Stalin's outreach makes him favourite

Winning his father’s admiration may have made him his heir apparent, but getting his voters’ trust comes with hard work and willingness to listen.

MK Stalin has several unfulfilled poll promises in Kolathur, a constituency he represents since 2011 and from where he is seeking re-election this time, but staying in touch with the voters has brought him their unswerving loyalty. The 63-year-old DMK treasurer also enjoys overwhelming support of the local cadres.

Perched in the northern edge of Chennai, Kolathur has 2.54 lakh voters, majority of whom are daily labourers and workers in unorganised sectors. Soon as he won the constituency in 2011 in a cliff-hanger contest with AIADMK’s Saidai Sa Duraisamy, Stalin had set out to lure his voters with the popular contact programme ‘Reach your MLA’, an innovative idea to stay in touch with the locals.

This time around, Stalin faces AIADMK’s JCD Prabhakar –the sitting MLA of Villivakkam constituency- and DMDK’s Madhivanan, who is little known to his voters.
“My visit to the office in Kolathur two to three times a week is obviously not enough to remedy the issues faced by people here,” Stalin admitted, though party cadres would rather place the blame on the doors of the ruling dispensation for the lack of progress in the constituency.

“There are even a couple of flyover projects sanctioned by the Centre that were delayed because officials working for the ruling party chose to sit on them,” charged DMK Chennai district secretary Sekar Babu, who manages the party’s north Chennai poll campaign, as he accused the government of tossing many of Stalin’s proposals into the cold storage.

Kolathur resident SK Raghavan listed engineering college, modernising Periyar Nagar hospital and building bridges and flyovers among the unfulfilled promises of Stalin’s five-year tenure as MLA.

“However, he did everything within his means to address the demands of local people,” Raghavan pointed out.

A first-time voter, Gunasekaran felt Stalin has to be re-elected to complete the left-over projects. “Otherwise, all his efforts would come to nothing,” he said.  Stalin’s ‘Pesalam Vaanga’ (come let us talk) initiative since 2013 brought an ever closer bond with the voters.  Prabhakar, the advocate who caused an upset in 2011 by defeating DMK veteran K Anbazhagan in Villivakkam by a big margin, believes another giant killing is not out of hand.

“Kolathur may have been won by the opposition (in 2011), but Amma’s welfare schemes have reached each and every household here. Therefore, they will vote for us,” Prabhakar said. Stalin was the deputy chief minister in the previous DMK government. He first became an MLA by winning the Thousand Lights constituency in Chennai in 1989.  Besides being the 44th Chennai Mayor between 1996-2001, the youth wing president continued to represent Thousand Lights in the Assembly in 1996, 2001 and 2006.

The DMK is confident of bagging Kolathur this time, especially after what it calls the mishandling of the December 2015 floods by the ruling party.