As BJP prepares to breach Kerala bastion, who is Suresh Gopi, its Thrissur candidate?

For the BJP, this win could be crucial — this is the first time that the party would clinch a Lok Sabha seat in Kerala, a state thus far elusive to the party. Thrissur is one of the seats that the BJP has been focusing on this election.

For 65-year-old Gopi too, this win is significant: not only did he lose the parliamentary seat to Congress’s T. N. Prathapan in the 2019 Lok Sabha, but he also unsuccessfully fought the 2021 Kerala assembly polls from here.

It was in October 2016 — months after he joined the BJP — that the party nominated Gopi to Rajya Sabha. Since then, Gopi had been one of the party’s star campaigners in Kerala and could attract huge crowds due to his tinsel-town image. As a result, despite having finished the 2019 polls third behind the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) and the Left Democratic Front, he created ripples in that election.

Thrissur is one of the few seats in Kerala where the BJP was hoping for a three-cornered contest in the state’s otherwise bipolar politics. This was because, in 2019, Gopi secured 8.2 percent vote share — a significant increase from the 11.15 percent that senior BJP leader K. P. Sreesan secured in 2014, showing that his “star” status could help the party consolidate votes.

In 2021 assembly polls, too, Gopi showed similar promise — although he finished third, he scored 31.3 per cent of votes, up from 19.46 percent the party managed in 2016.

For Gopi, the lead in the Lok Sabha polls comes on the back of his relentless vote outreach programmes. The BJP is also banking on the constituency’s significant Christian votes in Thrissur, which are estimated to be just over 24 percent of the total electorate, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s several public events and roadshows to push them over the finish line.

Gopi got his first break in the Malayalam film industry as a child artiste in the 1965 movie ‘Odayil Ninnu’. As an adult, he gained attention by playing a minor character in the 1986 movie ‘T. P. Balagopalan M’ before eventually becoming one of the Malayalam industry’s action stars in the 1990s.

He’s done 250-odd films during his career, mainly in Malayalam.

In September 2023, Gopi was nominated as the president of Kolkata-based Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute (SRFTI) and chairman of its governing council.

A month later, he was booked for sexual harassment after a female journalist accused him of putting his hand on her shoulder while answering a question during a media interaction in Kozhikode.