"Nadum namadhe, narpadhum namadhe (this country is ours, all the 40 seats is ours)". This was the slogan of Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin to enthuse the DMK cadres in the run-up to the Lok Sabha election. But it was also a message to make clear that Tamil Nadu wanted to have a say in deciding who is to govern India.
As he himself pointed out at a meeting of party workers, Tamil Nadu had not voted for the BJP, not in 2014, not in 2019, but Narendra Modi had become the Prime Minister without getting the mandate from the people of the state.
But, as it turned out, winning all the 40 seats in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry was easier than stopping the Modi juggernaut in the rest of India.
For the DMK, this was much more than a battle with its traditional rival, the AIADMK. This was part of a larger war at the national level, to dislodge the BJP government at the centre. Stalin got what he wanted in Tamil Nadu, but his hope of being in a position to influence national politics remained an unfulfilled dream.
The DMK had consciously strategised for winning all the seats. During the seat negotiations, the attempt was not to pass on the difficult seats to the allies. Quite the opposite was the strategy. It kept the tough constituencies for itself, ready to take on the BJP in the saffron strongholds. As the leader of the alliance, as the party with the strongest organisational structure in the state, the DMK knew it was best placed to deploy human and material resources on the ground.
Even in candidate selection, the DMK decided to go with defectors from the AIADMK. In Coimbatore, where it was locked in a fierce battle with the BJP state president K Annamalai, it chose a former AIADMK mayor Ganapathi P Rajkumar.
In Theni, which is, like Coimbatore, a bastion of the AIADMK, Stalin chose another AIADMK defector, Thanga Tamilselvan.
Only in its own bastions did the DMK go with candidates from its traditional leadership structure, giving the seats to veterans and sons of serving state ministers.
Together with the Congress, Stalin campaigned intensively in Puducherry for the re-election of Congress’ V Vaithilingam, who defeated A Namassivayam of BJP by 1,36,516 votes. People of Puducherry have been waiting for statehood, which Stalin and Vaithilingam promised the electorate, if the INDIA bloc came to power at the centre.
As a poll promise in the 2021 Assembly election, Stalin's DMK had promised Rs 1,000 for homemakers. This promise was rolled out last year under the Kalaignar Magalir Urimai Thittam providing Rs 1000 to 1.14 crore women and transgender above the age of 21 and with an annual income below Rs 2.5 lakh. There are other student assistance programmes which also played out in favour of the DMK.
The BJP may have raked up old corruption issues, enforcement agencies may have been used to put DMK ministers behind bars, dynastic politics may have been raised, the all settled Katchatheevu issue may have been resurrected, the Dravidian founders and leaders may have been abused by Annamalai, but it all seems to have not gone down well with most of the electorate.
What really worked was the hard work and strategy of the INDIA bloc cadres under the leadership of Stalin, to give INDIA all 40 seats from Tamil Nadu and Puducherry. The strategy of making it an election about keeping out Modi and BJP helped the DMK. But the three-way split in votes was the biggest factor. The AIADMK alliance was in second place in 27 constituencies and the NDA in the other 12.
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