A humble start, an abrasive campaign and now, a seat at high table
Palakkad legislator Shafi Parambil, a first-time MP, won the Vadakara seat in a close contest against popular CPI(M) leader KK Shailaja.
One March night this year, then Palakkad legislator Shafi Parambil was in a movie theatre when his phone rang.He was forced to pick up; it was after all Congress general secretary (organisation) KC Venugopal. “I’m calling to request you to run for Parliament from Vadakara,” Venugopal told him.
It was a bolt from the blue.
At the time, Parambil mumbled a reluctant acquiescence, but immediately began working the phones with colleagues within the Congress and its ally IUML, beseeching them to get him out of the contest. “To be frank, at that point, I was not ready to leave state politics, particularly my constituency of Palakkad which I had been nurturing since 2011. It was not because I was concerned about my prospects in Vadakara,” he told HT.
But the party had its way. And “as a loyal worker, I heeded my party’s instructions and prepared for the contest,” he added.
The contest in Vadakara was far from straightforward. Up against Parambil was KK Shailaja, the popular CPI(M) leader and former state health minister, who had earned plaudits for the state’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Both the Congress and the Left had established votebanks and loyal workers, and for most local analysts, the battle was far too close to call. But when the results came in on June 4, it became clear Parambil had bested Shailaja, and it wasn’t particularly close. He won 49.65% of the vote, and beat his CPI(M) opponent by 114,000 votes.
And so, a 41-year-old, a newbie to the corridors of power in Lutyens’ Delhi, a man who had never seen Parliament proceedings even from the viewing gallery, took oath on June 24 as a first-time MP in the 18th Lok Sabha.
Importantly, Parambil is one of only 24 Muslim MP’s in the Lok Sabha, two fewer than in 2019. Of them, the Congress has nine Muslims, the TMC five and the Samajwadi Party four. The highest Muslim representation in Indian parliament was 49 in 1980.
Parambil maintains that being Muslim is a personal belief, and not part of his “political identity.” “I have not used it to get an advantage in my political career or to showcase it as someone else’s disadvantage. My political identity is that I am a member of the Indian National Congress. I am a person who holds aloft secular values,” he told Manorama News on June 15.
Born into a middle-class Muslim family in 1983, Parambil was a public speaker and debater in school, but by the time he arrived at the SNGS College in Pattambi for a bachelors in business administration, his interest in student politics had taken root. Most colleges in the state, including his, were bastions of the Students Federation of India (SFI) aligned with the Left Front, with rival outfits afraid to begin units or enrol members.
Even in that atmosphere, Parambil’s allegiances were clear. “From a young age, my belief was in the Congress because it is firmly rooted in the secular and democratic ideals of India. It is the only party that can take along everyone from all backgrounds and faiths under its umbrella. So at the college level, I along with few others began efforts to strengthen the KSU,” said Parambil, referring to the Kerala Students Union, the student wing of the Congress.
Quickly, Parambil became a key member, playing a role in the formation of a union under the KSU banner in 2004. By 2006, he was the KSU Palakkad district president and the state chief by 2009, the first person in Kerala to be elected as such through an internal election process — an experiment championed by Rahul Gandhi across all NSUI units, only to be abandoned later.
By 2011, as a 28-year-old, Parambil was among a crop of young leaders — the others being VT Balram in Thrithala, Hibi Eden in Ernakulam and Anwar Sadath in Aluva — who were given tickets by the Congress to contest the assembly elections. This was an attempt at a party revitalisation of sorts, but came in seats where the CPI(M) was dominant. In Palakkad for instance, a seat with a majority Hindu population, the Congress had only won four of the 12 previous elections. But Parambil focused his campaign on the youth and women, and criss-crossed the constituency for weeks. On results day, Parambil staged an upset, beating the experienced incumbent CPI(M) MLA by over 2,400 votes.
Balram, a two-time MLA from Thrithala and the current Congress state vice-president said of Parambil, “Being youthful is a big part of his charisma. Through his communication skills, he can build a rapport with voters quite quickly and that’s what makes him a crowd-puller. Vadakara, a hub of high-voltage contests, needed someone like that and Parambil came there at the right time.”
That Parambil, even as a debutant MLA, was able to get a medical college commissioned in Palakkad with the help of then Congress chief minister and his mentor Oommen Chandy endeared him to voters, said Balram. “Its significance lies in the fact that CPM had three chief ministers elected from the district in the past and none of them could make it happen. And Parambil did it, just as a first-time MLA.”
Parambil won two more assembly elections from Palakkad, but in 2024, was air-dropped to Vadakara, 170km away, as part of a Congress strategy to counter both the CPI(M) and a rising Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The plan included shifting formidable leader and Vadakara MP K Muraleedharan to Thrissur to counter the BJP, days after his sister left the Congress to join the saffron party, and Parambil going to Vadakara. The first part of the scheme failed — Suresh Gopi of the BJP became the BJP’s first ever MP in Kerala, winning Thrissur — but Parambil kept up his end of the bargain.
Contests in Vadakara, spread across two assembly segments in Kannur and five in Kozhikode have always captured the state’s imagination. In the 2021 Assembly elections, the LDF won six of the seven segments. But when it comes to Lok Sabha elections, the CPM has had a dry spell — winning the seat last in 2004. This time, it brought in MLA KK Shailaja, believing in her ability to lure voters, especially women and those from the minority community, beyond political lines. Muslims comprise around 35% of the electorate in the constituency.
The campaign was charged — there were communal undertones and provocative Whatsapp forwards that highlighted Parambil’s religion; the killing of a CPI(M) worker in a bomb blast on April 5; even distasteful morphed videos of the CPI(M) candidate. Eventually, the constituency saw the highest voting percentage in Kerala at 78.41%, and on voting day, Parambil prevailed.
“I said right after the results that it was a 100% political victory. The campaign hurt me personally at times, because I was portrayed as someone belonging to a particular community, when I have always strived to rise above that. Even in the assembly, not a single line I have said has been struck off the record because I speak very carefully,” Parambil said.
He said the people of the constituency took over the campaign from his party. “It was a purely people-led campaign. At one place, I found an elderly woman who waited on the side of the road to meet me for four hours. When I met her, she handed me a small cloth bag which had a tricolour imprinted on it and inside, there was a ₹100 note. She said I would need it for the campaign. It touched me deeply,” he said.
Abdul Hameed, a 76-year-old paddy farmer in Vadakara, said, “He was born as Muslim, but that is not his sole identity. He is young, speaks plainly and shows humility. That’s what we liked about him.”
