Vijayakanth ruins AIADMK'S calculations

DMDK's vote share has steadily improved

This five-year-old party has repeated the role it played in the 2006 State polls by splitting the anti-incumbency votes, which in Tamil Nadu unfailingly land at the door of the opposing Dravidian party, in this case, the AIADMK.

Though Vijayakanth decided to contest alone and the party did not secure even a single seat out of the 39 constituencies in Tamil Nadu, DMDK has clearly emerged as the third party in the State. It is also all set to create a genuine alternative to the DMK and AIADMK, a move attempted by many political groups in the past, which did not bear fruit.    

The decent figure of votes it has secured this time in each constituency reveal that the party would emerge as a key player on the State’s political landscape in future. Its victory margins at 24 constituencies are higher than the margin of victory between the winner and runner-up, a remarkable achievement for a party that was launched only in September 2005 and had contested just one Assembly election.

The three constituencies in Chennai can be taken as a case in point. In North Chennai, The MDMK’s Yuvaraj polled 66,375 votes and has stood third here. The winner, DMK’s Ilangovan has won over CPI’s D Pandian by just 19,153 votes. Even in the elite South Chennai constituency, its candidate V Gopinath bagged 67,291 votes while the margin between the winner, AIADMK’s Chitlapakkam S Rajendran and DMK’s R S Bharati was just 22,935 votes. In the prestigious Central Chennai constituency, DMK’s Dayanidhi Maran trounced AIADMK’s Mohammed Ali Jinnah by 33, 454 votes while DMDK’s Ramakrishnan polled 38,959 votes here.

Captain’s victory

The previous Assembly elections also witnessed Vijayakanth’s party securing higher than the victory margin between the two Dravidian parties in 63 constituencies. The only victory was registered by Vijayakanth or ‘Captain’ as he is popularly known at Virudhunagar though the party had contested in all the 234 constituencies. 

In the 2009 parliamentary polls, DMDK candidates also managed to secure over one lakh votes in the following constituencies, revealing the steady voter share the party was creating in the State – Kancheepuram (Tamizh Vendan), Aarani (Mohanan), Krishnagiri (Anbarasan), Dharmapuri (Elangovan), Villupuram (Ganapathy), Salem (Mohan Raj), Kallakurichi (L K Sudheesh) and Dindigul (Muthuvel Rajan) and Virudhunagar (Ma foi K Pandiarajan).

Political sources clearly feel the DMDK has eaten into the vote bank of the Pattali Makkal Katchi in the Vanniyar belt in North Tamil nadu. In the South, it has taken away the AIADMK vote bank, particularly that of women atnd youth.

Reacting to the poll results, Vijayakanth justified the party’s non-association with the leading parties saying, “We wanted to provide good governance in the State and felt we could do that only if we contested alone. If the DMDK had joined either alliance, it would have become just another political party.”
DH News Service