All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam has won nine of the 10 Assembly constituencies in the district has not come as a surprise for the party cadre, who say that it is a reward for their ground work.
A Bharatiya Janata Party leader, who observed the AIADMK work says that it will not be incorrect to say that the AIADMK started its election work at least three months in advance. It started somewhere in the third week of February, coinciding with the birthday of the party general secretary Jayalalithaa.
The party leaders and then probable candidates held functions, connected with ground level workers like those would be in charge of an area or booth and established a rapport that was hard to miss. This head start gave the party an edge in almost all the 10 constituencies.
An AIADMK leader says that by March-April, the district secretaries had tasked second and third level leaders with field work and they in turn delegated work to field level workers, whom they put in charge of booths. The booth workers’ duty was to reach out to voters coming under the booth assigned to them.
The leader says that even as AIADMK’s arch rival Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam was finalising its strategy, the party workers were on the ground, working.
Lack of dissent within the party also helped, says another AIADMK leader. The party cadre buried dissent once Ms. Jayalalithaa announced candidates and went on to work wholeheartedly. But, they could see dissent within the DMK cadre.
For instance, there was opposition to incumbent O.K. Chinnaraj’s candidature but once he filed his nomination and the deadline for withdrawal ended, there was no looking back, he adds.
DMK party sources say dissent was visible at many constituencies, but it was more noticeable in the Coimbatore North constituency, where it is an open secret that the candidate Meena Loganathan had to fight dissent within the party.
This impacted the DMK’s performance so much on the ground that in Ms. Loganathan’s home turf – Rathinapuri – the AIADMK polled more votes than the DMK.
A few DMK candidates who lost the election also acknowledge that the AIADMK consolidated its strongholds in rural areas and made inroads into DMK pockets. In places where the candidates could not visit more than once or twice, the second or third rung workers made up for it by door-to-door canvassing.
An AIADMK MLA-elect says on condition of anonymity says that the ground work paid dividend because the party was fighting anti-incumbency, which could be seen in the votes polled in urban areas. The party nearly predicted it right and concentrated on rural areas.
