The candidature of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) State vice-president Shobha Surendran in Alappuzha and the defection of Congress leader Padmaja Venugopal to the BJP seem to have compelled the Congress leadership to rejig its nominees for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls in Kerala.
To wrest the Alappuzha seat lost to Communist Party of India (Marxist)‘s A.M. Ariff in the previous election, the Congress has fielded All India Congress Committee general secretary (organisation) K.C. Venugopal, who had won from the constituency in 2014.
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