CHENNAI: Will the Congress’ poor show in Bihar weaken its prospects all way down in Tamil Nadu? Seems likely. Though the local Congress leaders are trying to put on a brave face, DMK supporters are of the opinion that the Bihar debacle will reduce the grand old party’s bargaining power when it comes to seat sharing in Tamil Nadu.
Having won a mere 19 of the 70 seats it contested in, the Congress dragged down the Mahagathbandan with it in Bihar. Soon after, DMK supporters piled on to Twitter expressing hope that the Dravidian major would remember this during the seat sharing for 2021 Assembly elections. The apprehension is not entirely unfounded.
In 2016, for instance, the Congress managed to win only 8 out of 41 seats it managed to wrest from the DMK as an ally. Had the DMK retained 20 of those 41 given to Congress, it may have won 15 helping it come to power in 2019 following the bypolls held to 22 Assembly seats, feel some. The Congress, however, likes to use a different yardstick — the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, where it won 8 of 9 seats allotted.
The argument does not hold water as the DMK swept the parliamentary polls on an anti-BJP poll pitch. The problem here, according to DMK insiders, has more to do with the Congress’ choice of candidates than its ground strength. “There is nothing wrong in allocating a fair number of seats to them but we have to be careful about which candidates are being fielded in the seats. Most of the time, the Delhi leadership gives seats to people not well-connected to the constituency making their defeat inevitable,” a frontline DMK leader said, pointing to the fact that the alliance’s only loss in 2019 was in Theni.
“They could have given the Theni seat to anyone linked to the Madurai region. Instead the seat was knowingly lost by allocating it to EVKS Elangovan who has no connection with the constituency. This time, we will directly approach the Congress national leadership if we need to change any candidate to ensure the victory of our alliance,” the leader said.
Even Congress members do not dispute the problem of selection of candidates. GK Murali, the state general secretary of the party’s farmers wing, said that in Bihar in 45 of the 70 seats allocated to Congress, the seats were given to the candidates for various reasons without considering their victory prospects.
“Most of our candidates took the seats only to get their name in the candidate list without any aspiration to win. That’s why we are witnessing this result,” he said. However, he believed that in Tamil Nadu the DMK would give “due respect” and seats to the party as the alliance with the Congress would strengthen its reputation as an anti-BJP party.
On the other hand, Tamil Nadu Congress Committee president KS Alagiri sought to spin the party’s losses in Bihar. “We can’t decide the weakness and strength of a party by counting the winning seats. We lost in many assembly constituencies by a slim margin and our alliance couldn’t have reached that position without the Congress. Similarly, our alliance candidates won by a wafer-thin margin in several seats where the Congress was the catalyst that pushed them over the winning line,” he claimed. According to Alagiri, alliances should work based on chemistry rather than arithmetic.