Anjali Nair became one of the more talked-about faces of Kerala’s recent election cycle — not for winning, but for the string of candid campaign moments that found their way onto social media and stayed there. The actress, who contested from Thrippunithura on a Twenty20 Party ticket, has now spoken at length to Manorama Online about what those weeks actually felt like from the inside.
The recurring theme in her account is context collapse. A moment of genuine warmth — a party worker referring to her as “our MLA” before she had even won, which made her happy enough to mention it in an interview — became a troll. Her mention of her father’s childhood prediction that she would enter politics and become a minister — shared as a personal memory — became another troll. A conversation with a young man on a playground who told her he would not vote for her because she played the police officer who troubled Laletan in Drishyam — a good-natured exchange she clearly enjoyed — got clipped and reframed.
“I never spoke about communalism or religion anywhere. Yet what I received was only mockery,” she told Manorama Online.
The Campaign Itself
Thrippunithura is a large constituency. Anjali had limited days to campaign it. She describes running between houses, stopping a woman on the road mid-sprint to ask for her vote — and then getting criticised for being disrespectful to an elderly woman. Videos cut without continuity, she says, were the source of most of the misreadings. She also had to deal with claims that she had paid lakhs to contest — something she says she does not know how to even respond to.
She received close to 30,000 votes. She lost. She is still in the constituency — meeting people, listening to problems — and says she intends to stay in politics. Film discussions are also continuing in parallel.
Her father told her she would be a minister one day. She is not done with that idea yet.
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