Clean roads; not a piece of paper out of place; flowering plants in pots that line both sides of the streets; no spitting on the roads—Sulthan Bathery municipality is a sight for sore eyes. The cleanest town in Kerala with a Bougainvillea plant as its icon, which welcomes tourists to Wayanad from Karnataka and Tamil Nadu alike, is gearing up for a fierce battle in the coming local body polls.
Ever since its inception in 2015, the Left Democratic Front has ruled this upland town. Though it was touch and go in 2015, the LDF asserted its position in 2020. However, Sulthan Bathery has a history of being a United Democratic Front stronghold for over three decades, when it was a panchayath.
Since 1962, except for eight years when the LDF came to power, it was under the UDF thump. Wayanad being a traditional UDF stronghold in general, with the sitting MP (Priyanka Gandhi Vadra) and MLA (I.C. Balakrishnan) representing the Congress, one could say the UDF has an upper hand in the region.
But the ruling council of the municipality, chaired by T.K.Ramesh strongly believes that the developmental activities undertaken over the past 10 years will trump the tradition. Besides winning several awards for cleanliness, the municipality was one of the first to declare itself to have achieved complete digital literacy in the State. “We have worked well in all sectors, be it education, health, infrastructure or welfare. Voters are unlikely to forget it,” says Mr. Ramesh, who is contesting again.
The feud within the Congress in Wayanad district has put the UDF in a disadvantage. The recent death by suicides of party functionaries and the allegations of corruption in the Congress governed cooperatives are freshly imprinted in the minds of the voters.
The National Democratic Alliance is hoping for a repeat and possibly surpass its performance in the parliamentary polls of 2024, when the BJP had enough votes within the municipality to come second. Former State president of the party K.Surendran, who contested against Rahul Gandhi in 2019, had promised to change the name of the town to ‘Ganapathi Vattam’ as it was referred to in many archives, triggering a controversy.
The parties have already announced all their candidates and the campaigning is on the slow burner at present.
Published – November 25, 2025 09:27 am IST
