BJP's Suresh Gopi has defeated his CPI rival V S Sunil Kumar by nearly 75,000 votes to help his party win its first ever Lok Sabha seat in Kerala.
While Gopi garnered a total of 4,12,338 votes, Sunilkumar had to make do with 3,37,652 votes, according to the EC figures.
Congress's senior leader and MP K Muraleedharan settled in the third position with 3,28,124 votes, it said.
Gopi had lost from Thrissur in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections and then in the 2021 state assembly polls.
BJP has not won a single seat in Kerala since the party's formation in 1980.
Earlier, BJP's Rajeev Chandrasekhar was also ahead of Congress's incumbent Shashi Tharoor in initial vote counting. However, Tharoor prevailed over Chandrasekhar after a see-saw battle and won by a margin of just 16,000 votes.
Kerala is a critical state for BJP's southern expansion goal.
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