CHENNAI: DMK president MK Stalin announced the details of the seat-sharing pact with allies for the parliamentary elections, on Friday. He said the DMK’s candidates would be announced on Sunday and election manifesto would be released in five days. “We will be releasing a separate manifesto for the bypolls,” Stalin said.
On expected lines, DMK retained all three segments in Chennai, apart from the neighbouring Sriperumbudur and Kancheepuram constituencies. In the delta region, a stronghold of the DMK, the party will contest in two out of three seats — Thanjavur and Mayiladuthurai. The third, Nagapattinam, has been given to CPI.
Allies have, reportedly, expressed satisfaction with the seats allotted to them. The only pending issue for the team is to decide if MDMK and VCK will contest on independent symbols or DMK’s rising sun. “Those parties will clarify the details while announcing their candidates,” Stalin said.
Later in the day, CPI(M), CPI and IUML announced their candidates. The CPI(M) has been given Coimbatore and Madurai constituencies. Former MP PR Natarajan would contest from Coimbatore and writer S Venkatesan would contest from Madurai.
IUML, which has been given the Ramanathapuram seat, announced K Nawaz Ghani as its candidate. CPI has named former MP Selvarasu as its Nagapattinam candidate and veteran leader K Subbarayan as its Tirupur contestant. In total, DMK has given 19 seats to allies. But, an analysis of the votes polled by these parties in the past elections shows that except the VCK, none of the allies have secured a decent percentage of votes.
PMK releases its poll manifesto
The PMK, which is part of the AIADMK-BJP alliance, released its poll manifesto on Friday. Many of its promises were against the schemes and projects implemented under the rule of its ally BJP at the Centre. Some of these are abolition of NEET and the Chennai-Salem expressway project. The PMK also promised to take steps to bring back the paper ballots.
AIADMK to release list on Sunday?
The ruling AIADMK has convened its district secretaries meeting for March 17 to discuss the works to be done for the Lok Sabha elections just a month away. The list of constituencies to be contested by each of the alliance parties is likely to be released on that day as the identification of constituencies is almost over except for a few pending ones.