Troika tumbles, Prince falls

Chennai: Not many, perhaps none at all, and not even he had dreamt that Karti Chidambaram would get anywhere bear winning the Sivagangai seat that his father, the illustrious P. Chidambaram had bequeathed to him.

The ‘prince’ of Chettinad had reportedly commented to close friends that it would be impossible to win, but he would certainly narrow the margin of loss to a respectable low figure. As it turned out, Karti finished fourth with a little over 10 per cent of the votes polled in his constituency nurtured for so long by its seven-time MP, his dad.

Senior Chidambaram had visited Sivagangai several times and cut many ribbons to inaugurate bank branches, ATMs and the like, besides making convincing speeches about how caring the Congress and its two UPA regimes have been towards the needs of the students and the poor. His pet theme was their easing of education loans from banks. With that kind of fostering, it was only natural for the Chidambarams to expect that the voters of Sivagangai would treat them well – out of gratitude even if not because of love.

They would be ruing the loss of DMK as poll partner. Had that party’s eternal prince-in-waiting Stalin acceded to minister Chidambaram’s plea for a revival of the alliance, Karti’s humiliation might have been considerably lessened. He might have even given a tough fight to saffron Raja for the third position.
The Chidambaram scion may take some consolation from the cryptic comment by shipping minister G.K. Vasan, who happens to be their rival within the Congress. Vasan had said the DMK leadership would regret its decision not to patch up with the Congress, which has about five per cent vote share in the state.

Perhaps the prophecy has now come true. Not only did the DMK draw a blank when votes were counted, three of their top stars, all of them former Union ministers, were badly humiliated. Karunanidhi’s beloved grandnephew Dayanidhi Maran lost in Central Chennai despite it being a compact and manageable constituency of middle-class, upper-class and most importantly, a large chunk of Muslims.

The DMK has been for long priding itself as a secular party trusted by the minorities as their protector against the ‘communal’ BJP and Jayalalithaa. Looking at the margin of Maran’s loss, it turned out that the DMK’s ‘fort’ crumbled at Amma’s feet and a good many Muslims voted for her candidate S.R. Vijayakumar, an unknown first-timer in his early 30s.

Karunanidhi’s rebel son M.K. Alagiri had spoken for a million upset minds when he said it was an insult to renominate A. Raja for Nilgiris constituency despite his spectrum slur. “What would people think of us? DMK will fare so badly they would not win even one or two seats,” Alagiri had said just about a couple of weeks before poll day, April 24.

His prophecy turned out to be true and Raja, despite all the nursing he had done to Nilgiris and its people, lost by over a lakh votes. Ironically, the first result declared by the Election Commission was Raja’s defeat at the hands of AIADMK’s C. Gopalakrishnan, just an ex-chairman of Coonoor municipality.
Former Union shipping and surface transport minister T.R. Baalu, who had ‘endeared’ himself to the Tamil people by launching the multi-million dollar Sethu Samudram project — weathering all criticism that it was soaked in high corruption lost to little-known AIADMK man K. Parasuraman by a margin of over 1.44 lakh votes.