STALIN WINS BIG, BUT GAINS LITTLE
Couldn’t Bag Enough Seats To Topple Govt
D.Govardan@timesgroup.com 24.05.2019
MK Stalin has won the first big election since the demise of his father, M Karunanidhi, but has actually gained little. He could not win enough assembly seats to topple the AIADMK government in the state, and the 37 MPs of the DMK-led bloc can do little in a Lok Sabha where the BJP has a clear majority on its own.
What is undisputed, though, is that Stalin stopped the Modi juggernaut in Tamil Nadu. The only Lok Sabha seat the alliance lost in the state was Theni, where EVKS Elangovan was defeated by deputy chief minister O Pannerselvam’s son, Raveendranath Kumar.
Ironically, 37 MPs will again sit in the opposition, like the 37 MPs of Jayalalithaa’s AIADMK in 2014. It’s not that the DMK didn’t do well in the assembly elections — it won 13 of the 22 seats. But that was not enough to loosen CM K Palaniswami’s grip on the state administration. Stalin will have to continue his struggle to come to power in the state. In a way, right from beginning of the campaign, EPS had focused his energy on the 22 assembly seats, more than the Lok Sabha seats. While the AIADMK’s allies – the BJP, the PMK and the DMDK – could see that lethargy on the ground, they could do little about it.
EPS, who has completed two years in power, can aspire to continue for two more years, especially after forcing T T V Dhinakaran and his AMMK to bite the dust at the hustings. In several constituencies, AMMK candidates were placed a distant third, while in a few they were relegated even further down by actor Kamal Haasan’s Makkal Needhi Maiam (MNM), which came an impressive third in all three Chennai Lok Sabha constituencies as well as in Coimbatore, with more than one lakh votes or close to that mark.
While both the AMMK and the MNM drew a blank, the drubbing of the AIADMK’s allies — the BJP, the PMK and the DMDK — was starker. The BJP, which forced the AIADMK into an alliance, ended up losing all the five LS seats that it contested, setting off a debate on the former pulling down the latter. The PMK, which was pitted against the DMK in six seats and a VCK candidate contesting on the DMK’s symbol in the seventh, lost all of them including Dharmapuri, where its youth wing president Anbumani Ramadoss was the sitting MP.
DMDK, which made the most noise while bargaining for seats with both the AIADMK and the DMK, before settling for four seats with the former, was another heavy loser. The party’s candidates in Dindigul and Trichy helped DMK alliance candidates score big victories by a margin of over 5.5 lakh and 4.5 lakh votes respectively.
Couldn’t Bag Enough Seats To Topple Govt
D.Govardan@timesgroup.com 24.05.2019
MK Stalin has won the first big election since the demise of his father, M Karunanidhi, but has actually gained little. He could not win enough assembly seats to topple the AIADMK government in the state, and the 37 MPs of the DMK-led bloc can do little in a Lok Sabha where the BJP has a clear majority on its own.
What is undisputed, though, is that Stalin stopped the Modi juggernaut in Tamil Nadu. The only Lok Sabha seat the alliance lost in the state was Theni, where EVKS Elangovan was defeated by deputy chief minister O Pannerselvam’s son, Raveendranath Kumar.
Ironically, 37 MPs will again sit in the opposition, like the 37 MPs of Jayalalithaa’s AIADMK in 2014. It’s not that the DMK didn’t do well in the assembly elections — it won 13 of the 22 seats. But that was not enough to loosen CM K Palaniswami’s grip on the state administration. Stalin will have to continue his struggle to come to power in the state. In a way, right from beginning of the campaign, EPS had focused his energy on the 22 assembly seats, more than the Lok Sabha seats. While the AIADMK’s allies – the BJP, the PMK and the DMDK – could see that lethargy on the ground, they could do little about it.
EPS, who has completed two years in power, can aspire to continue for two more years, especially after forcing T T V Dhinakaran and his AMMK to bite the dust at the hustings. In several constituencies, AMMK candidates were placed a distant third, while in a few they were relegated even further down by actor Kamal Haasan’s Makkal Needhi Maiam (MNM), which came an impressive third in all three Chennai Lok Sabha constituencies as well as in Coimbatore, with more than one lakh votes or close to that mark.
While both the AMMK and the MNM drew a blank, the drubbing of the AIADMK’s allies — the BJP, the PMK and the DMDK — was starker. The BJP, which forced the AIADMK into an alliance, ended up losing all the five LS seats that it contested, setting off a debate on the former pulling down the latter. The PMK, which was pitted against the DMK in six seats and a VCK candidate contesting on the DMK’s symbol in the seventh, lost all of them including Dharmapuri, where its youth wing president Anbumani Ramadoss was the sitting MP.
DMDK, which made the most noise while bargaining for seats with both the AIADMK and the DMK, before settling for four seats with the former, was another heavy loser. The party’s candidates in Dindigul and Trichy helped DMK alliance candidates score big victories by a margin of over 5.5 lakh and 4.5 lakh votes respectively.
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