In the contest for the Wayanad Lok Sabha seat, the only strategy left for the rivals was to explore as much as they could to discredit Rahul Gandhi, the MP who left Wayanad for Raebareli. Both CPI and BJP tried but fell woefully short.

The result felt like annihilation. Although the vote share dropped by 8 percentage points, Priyanka still managed to get a bigger margin of victory than her brother. If Rahul Gandhi’s margin of victory in early 2024 was 3.64 lakh, his sister’s was 4.10 lakh.

She also took back the Congress vote share that Rahul Gandhi had garnered in 2019, the first time he contested in Wayanad. Then Rahul’s vote share was 64.94 percent. Now, with 64.99 percent, Priyanka has restored it for the Congress.

For her challenger, her brother Rahul was her proxy. They had a litany of woes against Rahul Gandhi, a list good enough to scare off any candidate, however formidable she may appear.

First, Rahul Gandhi did not seriously address the man-animal conflict in Wayanad. Two, Rahul failed to persuade the Karnataka Congress chief to take a positive stand on the night travel ban along the Kozhikode-Kollegal NH that cuts through Wayanad. Three, Rahul failed to alert the Railway Board on the Nilambur–Nanjangud railway line.

Four, Rahul abandoned Wayanad at its worst crisis (Rahul had already resigned his seat in Wayanad when the Chooralmala-Mundakkai tragedy happened). Five, Rahul refused to raise even a pinkie when the Center refused financial assistance to landslide victims.

CPI’s Sathyan Mokeri, hoping to invoke the indignation of voters, even hinted that Rahul did not have the heart to take on Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He said that Rahul should have taken up the Wayanad issue with the Prime Minister. “If the Prime Minister had still refused, Rahul should have gathered all the Kerala MPs and staged a dharna in front of the Prime Minister’s office. He should have stayed until the money was paid,” Mokeri had said.

Six, Rahul was also accused of not uttering a word for farmers in Parliament. There were other far more embarrassing allegations, such as Rahul Gandhi not even having 50 percent attendance in Parliament. But none of these persuaded the Wayanad electorate. Priyanka Gandhi did not bother to address any of these allegations. But she convincingly articulated why her brother Rahul left Wayanad for Raebareli.

In her stump speeches, Priyanka disarmed her voters by collectively describing them as her brother’s saviour. “Many people turned their backs on him. Some of his closest colleagues left him. And it was at this time, the most difficult period of his life, that he turned to you for support and encouragement,” she said. She credited the Wayanad voters for all her brother’s achievements, including the Bharat Jodo Yatra. It worked if the vast majority were any indication.

The CPI, without much help from the CPM, was not a formidable force in Wayanad. In 2014, when Sathyan Mokeri gave Congress’s MI Shanavas a mighty scare, the CPM was fully behind him. Not this time. CPI insiders told Onmanorama that the CPM office in Kalpetta, in the heart of the constituency, had been closed throughout the campaign.

CPI’s disappointing performance will inevitably widen the party’s rift with CPM. It was an open secret that the CPM was only a token presence at Mokeri’s campaign meetings.

CPM sources had told Onmanorama that the party was not willing to spare its resources for a doomed battle. Further, after the CPI’s “complacent” stance on the ADGP issue, the CPM was not too eager to come to its partner’s aid. Moreover, Priyanka’s presence had drained the battle of all political significance.

But the BJP can take some heart. Although the party’s resources were concentrated in Palakkad, its young candidate, Navya Haridas, managed to sweep more than 1 lakh votes, the only BJP candidate apart from K Surendran to do so in Wayanad.

In the first half of 2024, when Surendran contested, he had the entire BJP apparatus behind him. Navya was largely left to her own devices. If Mokeri focused her energy solely on Priyanka, Navya took on both the Gandhi family and Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan. Her strategy was to come second, but eventually she lost to Mokeri, the runner-up, by over a lakh votes.