DMK seizes Vellore: Result suggests close battle for House in 2021
CHENNAI: While the ruling AIADMK may have lost the election to the Vellore Lok Sabha constituency, analysts were of the view that the narrow margin would boost the morale of the party. Further, it appears that the loss could also be attributed to the votes of its allies, PMK and DMDK, not being transferred to AC Shanmugam, the AIADMK candidate.
“The result has strengthened stability of government and shattered Stalin’s dream of unsettling the government,” political analyst Ravindran Duraisamy said, adding that it gave hope to AIADMK.
The party, itself, sees the Vellore outcome as a victory to its efforts. “DMK won the general elections in April-May by giving several false promises, including waiver of cooperative loans, jewel loans and education loans. But in Vellore, they could not make people believe these false promises. That is reflected in the poll outcome,” said Vaigai Selvan, former minister and AIADMK spokesperson.
Meanwhile, Shanmugam, who contested on the AIADMK symbol, secured 46.51 per cent of the total votes polled, indicating that the party’s vote base alone had taken him close to victory. This, despite the PMK and DMDK having a strong presence in the Vellore constituency and having secured a decent vote share in 2016 Assembly elections.
In 2016, the AIADMK polled 4,49,415 votes in the six Assembly segments that constitute the Vellore Lok Sabha constituency. In the same elections, the PMK, which contested alone, got 64,373 votes in the Assembly segments.
The People’s Welfare Front, of which DMDK and TMC were members, polled 40,666 votes. When AIADMK joined hands with PMK and DMDK for the recent parliamentary polls and Assembly bypolls, the alliance appeared arithmetically strong and suggested that the alliance candidate would easily cross 5,00,000 votes in the Vellore constituency and beat the DMK, at least by a narrow margin.
However, the AIADMK managed to secure 4,77,199 votes, losing by a narrow margin. If the vote share of the allies had transferred to AIADMK, it should have helped the party over the narrow margin.
Further, Shanmugam, too, was a strong contender as he had contested in Vellore in 2014 as a candidate of a rainbow alliance including BJP, DMDK and PMK. He had secured 3,24,326 votes at the time, coming second only to the AIADMK, which won the constituency, and pushing the DMK to the third spot. However, the Vellore result shows that choice of voters varies from election to election and alliance arithmetic based on votes secured in previous elections may not hold good in making predictions.