Campaign in 'noiseless' Erode (east) by-elections come to an end

Chennai: As the campaign dust settled on Monday, the by-elections to Erode (east) assembly constituency will go down as one of “noiseless” and less talked about in Tamil Nadu’s chequered history of snap polls.

Opposition AIADMK and BJP stayed away from the February 5 by-poll alleging that they feared the ruling DMK will resort to rampant use of money power to buy votes and confine them to election offices like the snap polls in February 2023.

The polls are a cake walk for the DMK with its nominee V C Chandrakumar, a turncoat from late actor Vijayakanth’s DMDK, taking on Naam Tamizhar Katchi’s M K Seethalakshmi, a less formidable opponent. Though this is not the first time that opposition parties have boycotted the by-polls, the absence of key players have saved the DMK of its financial and human resources.

Allegations of “heavily” bribing the voters with cash and household articles haven’t made headlines, no frenzied campaigning by the entire DMK cabinet, and no election rallies of high-profile leaders. The ruling party’s campaign is spearheaded by Housing Minister S Muthusamy and Erode MP K E Prakash with top DMK leaders like Chief Minister M K Stalin and his deputy Udhayanidhi Stalin giving canvassing for votes a miss.

Stalin made a mere appeal to the people to vote for the ruling party even as NTK chief Seeman, who was in the news recently for his uncharitable remarks against Dravidian legend E V R Periyar, made the fight one between Dravidianism and Tamil nationalism. Opinion polls have predicted that the DMK will garner over 75 per cent of the votes with NTK getting about 20 per cent votes, which will be a huge jump for the party.

This is the second time that Erode (east) faces a by-poll in two years – in 2023, Congress incumbent Thirumahan Evera’s death led to the election of his father E V K S Elangovan, who passed away in December 2024. Since the DMK expressed to contest the by-poll, the Congress ceded the seat.

By-polls in Tamil Nadu have always tilted in favour of the ruling party, be it the DMK or the AIADMK, since the 1990s, with wide-spread allegations of bribing the voters. In fact, Tamil Nadu is probably the only state that has witnessed maximum rescinding of elections between 2016 and 2019 due to heavy bribing of voters.

It has been the practice of the party in power to pool in all its resources to register a victory in the by-polls to demonstrate its hold over power, but many of these parties have tasted defeat in the general elections. The only two exceptions were in 2019 when the DMK won 13 of the 22 seats that went to by-polls and the victory of T T V Dhinakaran as an independent from R K Nagar in December 2017.

Political analyst Maalan Narayanan told DH that opposition parties weren’t interested since they didn’t waste their resources and time by contesting the by-election as the tenure of the elected legislators will be just 14 months.

“Another reason for them to boycott is that elections in Tamil Nadu have become very expensive. Obviously, the AIADMK and BJP didn’t contest the polls as a defeat at the hands of the DMK would put them on the defensive mode just a year before the assembly polls. The scenario would have been different if the candidate was from Congress,” he said.

Since the results are a foregone conclusion, the DMK too didn’t strain its muscles, but a victory would witness the party going to the town projecting it as a referendum on the performance of the nearly four-year-old government, Narayanan added.