CHENNAI: A day after the RK Nagar by-election left the DMK in disgrace, its working president M K Stalin on Monday announced a panel to probe the party’s dismal performance. The DMK came a distant third with its candidate Marudhu Ganesh losing his deposit.The panel consists of three members – R Sakkarapani, DMK whip in the Assembly, R Girirajan, and V Kannadasan, secretary and joint secretary of Lawyers Wing respectively.
The committee has been asked to go into the factors leading to the poll defeat and submit a report by December 31, a party release said.Earlier in the day, Stalin, in a letter to cadre, promised to find out betrayers and punish them. “Poll work, strategy, execution, lapses, negligence will be subjected to a scrutiny. An exercise of weeding out (those unwanted) will be carried out,” he assured.
Also, the party’s high-level committee will meet on Friday at 5 pm at Anna Arivalayam to take stock of the situation, party’s general secretary K Anbazhagan announced. The high-level committee, the top decision-making body of the party, is expected to do a postmortem on the poll debacle.
“The RK Nagar by-election outcome will be subjected to a thorough discussion in the meeting,” a senior leader of DMK said. The by-election outcome has thrown many challenges to the main opposition party as it could secure only about 24,000 votes even when there was sharp division in AIADMK.
The party has to find answers as the emergence of RK Nagar winner T T V Dhinakaran will have to be dealt with seriously.With the winning capacity of party’s de facto chief Stalin under question, the party has to redraw its strategy to move forward.