The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Thursday announced that E. Sreedharan 88, who is popularly known as the “Metroman'' would be the party’s CM candidate for the upcoming Kerala Assembly polls. Last week, Sreedharan had joined BJP, had indicated that he was willing to contest the assembly polls.
Announcing Sreedharan’s candidature, BJP state president k Surendran who is presently leading a state-wide yatra, said, “The party will soon release a list of other candidates as well.”
Differentiating between the BJP and the two traditional political fronts, Surendran said, "While the other two fronts are engaged in corruption, our model is what the Metroman showed when he finished the work of a bridge months ahead of the scheduled time and that's why we have put him as the Chief Minister candidate of the BJP. Metroman is our CM candidate.”
He further added that BJP chose the man behind the 'Metro revolution' in the country’, as he will bring rapid development and progress to the state.
"If the NDA, "under the leadership of 'Metroman', gets an opportunity to rule the state, "we are confident we will be able to implement development works under Prime Minister Narendra Modi with a ten-fold force in Kerala", Surendran said.
"He completed the project (Palarivattom flyover) in five months without any corruption. That is why we requested Sreedharan and our party leadership that he should be projected as the (NDA's) Chief Minister candidate", he added.
BJP has already named Sreedharan to the 16-member state election committee.
An engineer and the architect of the Delhi Metro had joined the BJP on February 25 and also expressed his interest in the governorship.
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He said his idea is to bring BJP to power in Kerala and if that happens, there will be three to four major areas of focus - one is infrastructure development in a big way and another is to bring industry to the state.
Ahead of the assembly elections, Sreedharan’s entry into BJP is considered a significant boost to the party where Left Democratic Front (LDF) and the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) have ruled alternately for the past many years.
Assembly elections in Kerala will be held in a single phase on April 6. Results will be announced on May 2.