The city is a growing metropolis, which attracts an increasing number of settlers from other parts of Tamil Nadu and India. This has meant a startling rise of 40.25 per cent in the number of registered voters in the six Lok Sabha constituencies in and around Chennai since the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. Migration of residents within the city too has led to a searing growth in numbers in constituencies outside Chennai’s core areas.
Chennai’s urban agglomeration, usually referred to as the Greater Chennai Area, contains areas that do not fall administratively under Chennai but are an integral part of the city. This means localities like Tambaram and Ambattur too are counted as part of the city, which is considered to stretch up to Kancheepuram and Thiruvallur. This area broadly falls under six Lok Sabha constituencies — Thiruvallur, North Chennai, South Chennai, Central Chennai, Sriperumbudur and Kancheepuram.
Together, these six constituencies have 93,19,531 registered voters on the electoral rolls that are to be used for the coming Lok Sabha elections. This is a whopping 40.25 per cent increase from 2009, when there were only 66,45,064 voters.
This growth has been attributed to a large number of youngsters who will be voting for the first time and the increasing number of people who are shifting to the city from other regions. The significant movement of migrants to the city and rising real estate prices in the core areas are also reflected in the phenomenally high growth rates in constituencies that house suburbs.
The Sriperumbudur constituency topped the list, where the number of voters grew by a mind-boggling 54.47 per cent. This is followed by South Chennai, where the increase clocks in at 47.58 per cent. The lowest growth, predictably, has been in South Chennai, where the number of voters grew by 27.93 per cent.
There is a gap in understanding the trend between the 2009 and 2004 Lok Sabha polls, as the constituencies were redrawn during the delimitation exercise of 2008. But the significance of the rise in numbers between 2009 and 2014 are perhaps better explained by the fact that there was a drop in the number of voters of 4.5 per cent in constituencies in and around Chennai between the 1999 and 2004 Lok Sabha elections.
Local leaders of major political parties acknowledge that the pattern of migration does affect their style of functioning. “The whole field changes with every single election. While those who come from outside usually take a longer time to transfer their vote to the constituency they presently live in, migration within the city has led to lakhs of votes moving about,” says J Anbazhagan, the South Chennai district secretary of the DMK.
He says the delimitation redrew the Assembly constituencies with roughly 3.7 lakh votes each, but the Sholinganallur Assembly constituency has grown particularly. “A large number of people in the city live in rented houses. The cost of real estate is rising very quickly, so they move to areas where the rent is lower. Also, there are a large number of apartment complexes that are coming up in the southern region,” he added.
The experience cuts across party lines. “It is not often that the ground work we put in before one election comes into use before another. Our party organisation has to track the changes continuously, even when elections are not being held,” says an experienced AIADMK functionary.
He adds that when they have to canvass for votes in areas that see significant numbers of those who have shifted to Chennai from rural backgrounds, the very nature of the discourse changes. “People in such areas are usually more focused on whether their street can get certain civic amenities rather than broad policy issues. We have to answer them and give them realistic assurances that our Chief Minister will deliver,” he added.
The large increase in the number of voters shifting into the city has also meant reorganisation of entire party machineries. Almost all the major political parties have carved out a larger number of party districts in Chennai over the past five years.
But the biggest impact of all is that as the city continues to grow and voter density rises, it is bound to have a much deeper impact on the rationale that voters exercise on polling day. As the character of the city changes with the changing nature of its population, it is inevitable that the questions that are asked and the causes of concern will change.
