NEW DELHI: The opposition candidate for Lok Sabha speaker against Bharatiya Janata Party’s Om Birla, Kodikunnil Suresh, is a veteran Indian National Congress politician and eight-term MP whose 2009 election was annulled by the Kerala High Court but reinstated by the Supreme Court.
Birla is seeking a second term as Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Suresh, 66, won in Kerala’s Mavelikkara (SC) constituency by a margin of just 10,000 votes.
He got his name from Kodikunnil in Thiruvananthapuram where he was born on June 4, 1962.
Suresh was first elected to the Indian Parliament in 1989 and was subsequently re-elected in 1991, 1996 and 1999. He was defeated in the 1998 and 2004 elections.
In 2009, he won again, but his closest rival contested his victory, claiming that Suresh, then a five-time MP, had presented a fake caste certificate and was a Christian.
The Kerala High Court declared his election invalid, but the decision was later overturned by the Supreme Court.
The high court allowed the election petition of defeated CPI candidate AS Anil Kumar and two others and ruled that Suresh was not a member of the ‘Chelamar’ community and therefore not a Scheduled Caste.
The court also held that he was “ineligible” to contest from Mavelikara constituency as it is a Scheduled Caste constituency.
The court held that Suresh had produced conflicting caste certificates issued by the tehsildars of Kottarakara and Nedumangad.
Suresh was first elected to the Lok Sabha from Adur constituency in 1989 and was subsequently elected thrice from the same constituency in 1991, 1996 and 1999. In the 2009 elections, he was declared elected from Mavelikkara constituency by a margin of 48,046 votes.
After the delimitation, Adur ceased to be a constituency in the Indian Lok Sabha.
At the time, Suresh had blamed some groups within his party and the opposition for filing the case and termed it a conspiracy.
But the Congress leadership supported him.
Suresh, who holds a law degree, won the 2014, 2019 and again in the recently concluded 2024 elections.
He serves on several parliamentary committees and was previously the Kerala state president of the Indian National Congress.
Published June 25, 2024 10:36 IST
