DMK–Congress Rift Over Seat Sharing Eased After Stalin–Chidambaram Talks; Alliance Intact for Now
Stalin, who was at an event, drove back home when told about the Congress leaders’ plan to meet him and also invited senior party colleagues to join in the discussion. So MPs Kanimozhi and A Raja too arrived for the talks.
Chennai: The looming fears of ties snapping between the DMK and the Congress due to the disagreements over seat-sharing were assuaged on Tuesday at a meeting between former Union minister P. Chidambaram and TNCC president K. Selvaparunthagai and Chief Minister M.K. Stalin at his residence and worked out a solution to the dispute.
Stalin, who was at an event, drove back home when told about the Congress leaders’ plan to meet him and also invited senior DMK colleagues to join in the discussion. They were joined by DMK MPs Kanimozhi and A. Raja. The meeting with the Chief Minister ensured that the ongoing seat-sharing talks between the panel constituted by the DMK and the committee formed by the Congress under AICC in charge of Tamil Nadu Girish Chodankar were not derailed.
Speaking to the media after the meeting, Selvaperunthagai said the seat-sharing negotiations were on and that an agreement would be arrived at soon. He dismissed reports of hitches that reportedly threatened to break the ties as regular demands raised as part of the bargaining process.
Ahead of that, the firm stand of Chodankar on getting 39 Assembly seats – one for every Lok Sabha constituency and a number that would help the party elect a Rajya Sabha member on their own – and the DMK’s summary dismissal of the demand had cast doubts over the progress of the talks.
Coupled with that, rumours of the Tamilaga Vetri Kazhagam (TVK) president Vijay planning to announce a tie-up with Congress at the party’s Thanjavur meeting of office-bearers on Wednesday also started circulating.
The seat-sharing talks are expected to resume soon though the Congress will have to identify their candidate for the Rajya Sabha nomination that had been agreed in the talks so far since the papers would have be filed by Thursday.
Though the DMK promised two nominations to the Rajya Sabha in Tuesday’s talks, the second seat would not be allotted now but in the next round of elections, it is learnt.
The TVK had reportedly given Wednesday as the deadline for the Congress since it wanted to make its historic announcement at Thanjavur but it is learnt that most of the top leaders of the TNCC were against aligning with the new party despite Mr Chodankar and some others being keen on it.
Chidambaram and Selvaperunthagai are reported to have pulled strings at the highest level by talking to AICC president Mallikarjun Kharge to make Sonia Gandhi support the continuation of the alliance with the DMK.
However, the bad blood created at the grassroots level of the DMK by the Congress leaders through their assertions of supremacy, when the dispute over seat-sharing was raging in social media, could make a deleterious impact on the joint campaigns of the alliance.
