CHENNAI: Vijayakanth’s DMDK appears to have lost all its political relevance with the party forfeiting deposit in all the 60 seats it contested in the recently-concluded Assembly elections. Party treasurer Premalatha Vijayakanth too failed to retain deposit as she secured only 25,908 (13.17 per cent) out of 1,96,734 votes polled in Vridhachalam constituency. A contestant should get minimum 16.6 per cent of votes to receive back the election deposit.
The party that faced the polls allying with the AMMK, polled 2,00,156 votes in 60 seats with an average of 3,335 votes per seat. It had severed its ties with AIADMK after the latter refused to allot it more than 11 seats during pre-poll discussion. Its over all vote share is 0.43 per cent and proportionate to the number of seats (25 per cent) it contested, the vote share stands at 1.68 per cent, which is lower than the shares of NTK, AMMK and MNM.
Though the DMDK dragged the seat sharing talks for over seven days with AIADMK demanding it to be treated on par with the PMK, which was allotted 23 seats, the election results have vindicated the stand of AIADMK, which believed that DMDK was no longer a political force. In the 2006 Assembly elections, the Vijayakanth party, one year after it was launched, surprised the political fraternity by securing 8.4 per cent votes in the State. It contested in 232 constituencies and Vijayakanth alone emerged victorious.
Three years later, the DMDK fielded candidates in 39 Lok Sabha seats and received 10.3 per cent votes, thereby emerging as the third largest party in Tamil Nadu. Political observers credited the party’s impressive growth to Vijayakanth’s popularity in rural areas. In 2011, the party allied with AIADMK and won in 29 out of 41 Assembly seats. It was the second largest party then and Vijayakanth became the leader of Opposition.
The descend began in 2014. The DMDK forged alliance with BJP, MDMK and the PMK, and contested in 14 seats in the Lok Sabha elections. Apart from losing in all the seats, the DMDK’s vote share plunged to 5.1 per cent. Two years later, it formed Makkal Nala Kootani (People’s Welfare Alliance) with Left parties, MDMK and the VCK. The party lost in all the 105 seats it contested in, bringing its vote share down to 2.4 per cent. In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls too, it lost in all four seats in contested in under the AIADMK alliance. The party functionaries attribute the party’s poor show to the lack of secondary-level leadership and Vijayakanth’s poor health condition.
CEO hands over ECI notification to Governor
Chennai: Chief Electoral Officer Satyabratha Sahoo handed over Election Commission of India’s notification to Governor Banwarilal Purohit on Tuesday. According to a Raj Bhavan release, the CEO handed over the notification of the ECI under section 73 of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 for due constitution of the new Legislative Assembly.
