State Of Chaos

With Dhinakaran’s win in the R.K. Nagar byelection, uncertainty returns to Tamil Nadu politics

- Lakshmi Subramanian

Come December, and Tamil Nadu finds itself on the cusp of political change. Last December, the state lost one of its strongest leaders, former chief minister J. Jayalalithaa, and with her its political stability. This year, almost a fortnight after her first death anniversary, Jayalalithaa’s constituency—Dr Radhakrishnan Nagar (R.K. Nagar)—went to the polls. The result of the December 21 byelection could change the political scene in the state, again. For, the ruling AIADMK and the opposition DMK were decimated by independent candidate T.T.V. Dhinakaran, nephew of Jayalalithaa’s jailed aide V.K. Sasikala. While Dhinakaran won by more than 40,000 votes, the DMK candidate lost his deposit. The BJP candidate got only 1,417 votes, fewer than even NOTA.

Both the AIADMK and the DMK were confident of a win. On the same day as the byelection, a special CBI court in Delhi acquitted all the accused in the 2G spectrum scam, including DMK patriarch M. Karunanidhi’s daughter Kanimozhi and former telecom minister A. Raja. Soon, polling picked up in R.K. Nagar, and by 6pm the voter turnout was close to 78 per cent—the highest in a bypoll in the state. Owing to the high voter turnout and the infighting within the AIADMK, the bypoll should have been a cakewalk for the DMK. But the party’s candidate Maruthu Ganesh N. bagged only 24,651 votes.