Vengara Assembly By-election: IUML Retains Seat With KNA Khader's Victory

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IUML chief PK Kunhalikutty who vacated the Vengara seat and later won the Malappuram Lok Sabha seat earlier this year said the CPI-M used all its might, but we knew what was going to be the outcome.

Malappuram: The Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) candidate K N A Khader won the Vengara by-election on Sunday, with a hefty margin of over 23,310 votes.

According to the Chief Electoral Officer, Khader got 65,227 votes, CPI(M) candidate P P Basheer came second with 41,917 votes followed by SDPI candidate K C Naseer and BJP candidate K Janachandran in the third and fourth positions.

A total of 502 voters pressed the NOTA button.

IUML chief P K Kunhalikutty, who vacated the Vengara seat and later won the Malappuram Lok Sabha seat earlier this year, said that though CPI(M) had used all its might, the outcome was known to them.

Kunhalikutty had also won the seat in the 2016 Assembly elections with a margin of over 38,000 votes.

Over 70 percent voter turnout was recorded at the Vengara assembly by-election here on Wednesday, officials said.

While the turnout was brisk at 7 am, when the polling started, the final turnout at the close at 6 pm was 71.2 per cent — above the the 70.7 per cent turnout in the 2016 Assembly polls. Polling was peaceful.

This is the first time that the Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) is being used in all the polling booths in a constituency in Kerala.

The by-election was necessitated when sitting legislator and top Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) leader P K Kunhalikutty vacated the seat after he was elected from the Malappuram Lok Sabha constituency in April this year.

IUML - the second biggest constituent of the Congress-led UDF, has fielded two-time former legislator K.N.A. Khader, who expressed confidence that he will have a cakewalk.

His main opponent, the Communist Party of India-Marxist's P P Basheer, who is the only candidate among the six contenders hailing from this constituency, arrived with his entire family to cast his vote and expressed his own confidence of the outcome.

Considered as one of the strongest constituency for the IUML, in which Kunhalikutty won the 2016 Assembly polls with a record margin of 38,057 votes, one of the highest margins in the state, the CPI(M) was however expecting Basheer to put up a strong fight.

The Bharatiya Janata Party had fielded K Janachandran Master.

(With IANS inputs)