After a 10-year-long gap, DMK in direct fight in Coimbatore
COIMBATORE: After a decade, the DMK will field its candidate in Coimbatore parliamentary constituency. DMK last won the Coimbatore LS seat in 1980 and 1996. The party was unsuccessful in 1998 and 2014.
CPM won the seat in 2019, but DMK has kept Coimbatore, to itself this time. Sources said youth wing secretary Udhayanidhi Stalin will likely lead the campaigning as the party is keen to break the Coimbatore jinx.
Considered to be the stronghold of arch rival AIADMK, the DMK allotted the seat to allies. In 2014, AIADMK won with a margin of 42,016 and DMK was pushed to the third place behind C P Radhakrishnan of the BJP. The BJP too has cultivated a sizeable vote bank in the constituency since 1996.
Even in 2021 assembly election, when AIADMK led by Edappadi K Palaniswami lost the power to DMK, candidates of the Two Leaves party and allies won all six seats - Sulur, Coimbatore South, Coimbatore North, Singanallur, Sulur, all in Coimbatore and Palladam in Tiruppur district that falls under the Coimbatore Lok Sabha constituency. Apart from this, AIADMK alliance won in all ten constituencies in Coimbatore in that election. In 2016, AIADMK won 9 out of 10 seats and DMK managed to win just the Singanallur seat (N Karthik).
With DMK returning to power, the party focussed its efforts on in Coimbatore and earned a massive victory in the urban local body elections held in 2022. Former minister V Senthil Balaji, who was the in-charge of Coimbatore, played a major role in the victory. With Balaji out of active politics due to imprisonment in the jobs-for-cash scam case, sources said youth wing secretary and minister Udhayanidhi Stalin will likely take the reins of campaigning as the party is keen to break the Coimbatore jinx.
Also, speculation is rife that BJP would be fielding a strong candidate in Coimbatore. Given the equations between the two parties that are ideologically different from each other, the DMK will go all out to prove its strength in Coimbatore. This became clear after the party wrested the seat from ally CPM in exchange for Dindigul, from where it won by around 5 lakh votes in 2019.
Speaking to TNIE, DMK’s urban district secretary N Karthik said, “Peoples’ support for DMK has increased multifold on seeing the government’s implementation of projects and schemes for Coimbatore. There is overwhelming enthusiasm among our cadres as we are going to contest directly in the constituency. The cadres have been making the demand for a long time and they are fired up as the high-command has accepted it. As many as 21 functionaries have submitted applications expressing willingness to contest from Coimbatore. Whoever is fielded will will win by a huge margin.”