Foot in the door

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By-election to Radhakrishnan Nagar assembly constituency in Tamil Nadu has produced a result that has the potential to cause more uncertainty not only in the politics of Tamil Nadu, which has been struggling to achieve stability, but also at the national level. The national story is simple to understand. While Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi has been tentatively trying to keep the AIADMK factions in a lukewarm atmosphere, he has also been calling on M Karunanidhi, the DMK chief and his son Stalin with a hope to tie up with whosoever seems the ablest to fight well in 2019. Modi’s apple cart seems to have gone unsteady for the time being. More so, because NOTA (None of The Above) has scored more than double the votes than what the ruling national party BJP has in RK Nagar. TTV Dhinakaran, the AIADMK bigwig who had been sidelined by the party during the change of guard following the demise of former chief minister and party supremo J Jayalalithaa and who contested the by-poll at Radhakrishnan Nagar as an independent candidate, has given a sound drubbing to both the ruling AIADMK and the chief opposition party, the DMK. He bagged 89,013 votes, which is more than 50 per cent of the votes in the constituency, by the end of the nineteenth and final round of counting, and defeated his nearest rival AIADMK’s E Madhusudhanan (48,306) by 40,707 votes. A total of 1.76 lakh voters out of 2,28,234 had voted at the election Thursday. The by-election was a major test for the ruling party and a highly symbolic one as the party had split into O Panneerselvam (OPS) and E Palaniswami (EPS) factions after Jayalalithaa’s death and has been clinging on to power on the strength of a highly entropic OPS-EPS power-sharing formula. The by-poll result has muddied the waters further as it heralds the return of the group that has been named the ‘Mannargudi Mafia’ back into mainstream politics of Tamil Nadu. VK Sasikala, who is confined in the Parappana Agrahara jail in Karnataka, and nephew Dhinakaran can now claim that the mandate delivered in the constituency once held by Amma herself reaffirms their place in the hearts of the people as the true political heirs of Jayalalithaa. It will have to be forgotten that Dhinakaran had been removed from the party by none other than Jayalalithaa herself and the fact that some slogans raised even as the election results were pouring in made references to Dhinakaran as the successor of MGR. There was also much symbolism in the first visit that Dhinakaran made after returning to Chennai — to the memorial of MGR and Jayalalithaa. With his resounding win, Dhinakaran appears to have justified his claim that he had ‘sleeper cells’ within the AIADMK, and he could end up being more powerful than before in the politics of Tamil Nadu. When asked what his election symbol pressure cooker stood for, Dhinakaran had said it represented the womenfolk who were dear to Amma and, more important, as a sign of the pressure that his opponents were about to face. The OPS-EPS combine has good reason to feel disappointed as this one seat would have helped the party cross the halfway mark in 234 member assembly with 118 seats and given it a leg-up psychologically. A victory at RK Nagar would also have worked as a stamp of approval for the OPS-EPS combine, which had won a minor victory earlier in being able to retain the two leaves symbol of AIADMK. The Election Commission’s decision was read as a mark of not only the credibility of the combine over that of the Sasikala camp but was also a clear sign of where the federal government had put its weight.
For the opposition DMK, too, a result in their favour would have been much welcome. It would have given further fillip to what is being seen as a revival of their fortunes with the verdict in the 2G scam. But the opportunity stands lost. Dhinakaran now has a foot in the door. How wide will he be able to open it will determine the future of Tamil Nadu politics.