The DMK and the AIADMK are close to wrapping up the task of constituency identification and allocation with their respective allies.
DMK president M.K. Stalin will on Friday formally announce the seats from where candidates would be fielded by his party, the Congress and other allies.
The AIADMK too is expected to finalise the task by the weekend, if not earlier.
On Thursday, a delegation of the Congress led by its state unit president K.S. Alagiri held a detailed discussion pressing for allotment of “winnable” seats at the DMK headquarters, Anna Arivalayam.
‘Extremely happy’
Emerging from the meeting, Mr. Alagiri said the exercise was completed in just two sittings. “We are extremely happy with the exercise. The constituency identification exercise has been completed smoothly for all the 10 seats allotted to us. The DMK will announce the details on Friday,” he said. The Congress has invited ticket aspirants to apply on March 15 and 16, following which it would finalise the list of candidates.
While Congress leaders remained tight-lipped on the constituencies allotted to them, sources in the DMK indicated that besides Puducherry, the party may be given the Sivaganga, Kanniyakumari, Virudhunagar, Theni, Tiruchi, Karur, Krishnagiri, Tiruvallur and Arani parliamentary constituencies. The national party has, however, not been given any seat in Chennai as the DMK has retained the three constituencies in the State capital for its candidates.
“The constituencies are distributed across Tamil Nadu in the northern, central, southern and western regions,” a source said.
Some of these constituencies have been the Congress’ traditional seats in any alliance. For instance, Sivaganga, represented many times by veteran leader P. Chidambaram, and Virudhunagar have mostly been allotted to the Congress in the past.
Tough fight
“In Theni, if the Congress fields J.M. Haroon, a former MP from the constituency, who is considered to be resourceful, he would be able to give a tough fight to Ravindranath, the son of AIADMK coordinator O. Panneerselvam, who is expected to be fielded there by the ruling party.
With Theni being the former constituency of Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam leader T.T.V. Dhinakaran, it is expected that the party’s candidate would end up considerably eating into the AIADMK’s votes.
Also, Mr. Dhinakaran’s supporter and disqualified Andipatti MLA Thanga Tamilselvan exercises a lot of influence in the region,” argued a second-line leader in the Congress.
The DMK was keen on fielding a candidate in Kanniyakumari but eventually gifted it to the Congress, whose candidate H. Vasantha Kumar was the runner-up in the constituency in 2014 when the national party went it alone. The DMK, in fact, was pushed to the fourth place.
It is learnt that the DMK has allotted Madurai and Coimbatore constituencies to the CPI (M) and Tirupur and Nagapattinam to the CPI.
In the rival camp, the AIADMK appears to be not too keen on fielding candidates in two of the three Parliamentary constituencies in Chennai. Sources said that the party has retained South Chennai, where the sitting MP is Jayavardhan, son of Fisheries Minister D. Jayakumar, who has emerged the de facto AIADMK and government spokesperson.
The party is learnt to have allotted the Central Chennai seat to the PMK and the North Chennai constituency to the DMDK.
Both the Dravidian parties will field 20 candidates each in addition to a few who would be contesting on their election symbols.
