The victory of Sasikala’s nephew and independent candidate T.T.V. Dhinakaran in the Dr Radhakrishnan Nagar bypoll has significance far beyond the numbers in the thumping margin with which he beat the odds stacked against him. His victory could be a turning point in the Tamil Nadu political scene rendered tumultuous in the wake of the death of the AIADMK party’s charismatic leader J. Jayalalithaa. The fight for the Jaya legacy may have been settled even though its main claimant Sasikala has been convicted making her ineligible to contest polls for 10 years. Fighting her proxy battle, Mr Dhinakaran managed to win nearly twice as many votes as the official AIADMK, which is in the hands of chief minister Edappadi Palaniswami and his deputy O. Panneerselvam, and more than three times what the DMK, two of whose prominent members were recently absolved in the 2G scam case, could muster.
The RK Nagar voters, who freely imbibed the cash-for-votes, may have made this the most corrupt election ever in the history of Indian polls. And yet they were only reaffirming that graft, among politicians and leaders, is no big issue with the people. That means a lot in a state whose most popular chief minister went to jail and would have been deemed guilty in the DA case too if not for the charges abating because she had died. The immediate threat arising from the fallout of the bypoll verdict is to the stability of the Palaniswami government whose nebulous majority in the Assembly has not been tested yet after the rebel Dhinakaran took away his faction of MLAs to resorts for an extended “holiday”.
The winning candidate, who lost the battle before the EC, for the popular “Two Leaves” symbol of MGR and Jaya’s party, has openly threatened to bring down the government soon. While results in other byelections held elsewhere in the country stuck to form in West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Arunachal Pradesh, the verdict in the constituency in north Chennai is the only one that has the potential to change the politics not only in Tamil Nadu but also in coalitions ahead of the 2019 general elections to Parliament. The MGR-Jaya party has two choices ahead — either merge to keep the government in place and continue to enjoy the patronage of the Centre or the Sasikala faction can bring the regime down and force fresh Assembly elections.
