The Kerala Police, on Wednesday, filed a chargesheet in the Kasaragod district Sessions Court against BJP state president K Surendran and five other party leaders in the Manjeswaram election bribery case.

The Crime Branch wing of the police named Surendran as the first accused in the case. Apart from K Surendran, Yuva Morcha’s former state treasurer Sunil Nayak, BJP’s former district president Advocate K Balakrishna Shetty, local leaders, Suresh Nayak, K Manikandarai and Lokesh Londa, are named in the chargesheet.

The accused have been charged under the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 Section 3 (1) (l) (B); criminal intimidation (Section 506 (1) of the IPC), and wrongful confinement (Section 342 of IPC); and .Section 171 (B) of the IPC for election bribery. The charge under the SC-ST Prevention of Atrocities Act is non-bailable and if convicted, the accused will be sentenced to a prison term of six months to five years.

Sundara, who was a BSP candidate from Manjeswaram, was given Rs 2.5 lakh and a smartphone to withdraw his candidature. The case is based on the complaint filed by K Sundara, who said the BJP leaders kidnapped him and gave him Rs 2.5 lakh and a mobile phone worth Rs 15,000 to withdraw his nomination papers from the Manjeswaram Assembly election.

The case was based on a complaint filed by CPI-M leader VV Rameshan, a LDF candidate in the Manjeswaram constituency during the 2021 April Assembly elections. On 5 June 2021, Sundara, who filed nomination to contest from the Manjesaram Assembly constituency, revealed that the BJP was worried that the votes of Surendran, who was the BJP candidate in Manjeswaram, would decrease if he contested because his name is almost similar to Surendran and bribed him to withdraw his nomination papers.

Sundara, who contested the 2016 Assembly election as an independent candidate, garnered 467 votes. He lost to Muslim League’s P B Abdul Razak by 89 votes.

The BJP leaders believed that Sundara might have got some BJP votes because of the similarity in the names. This might have resulted in the defeat of Surendran in the 2016 polls, they said.

Though Sundara withdrew from the election in 2021, he lost by a margin of 1,143 votes to Muslim League candidate A K M Ashraf.