In a major setback to the All India N. R Congress, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) has wrested the Thattanchavady Assembly seat from AINRC in the bypoll held on April 18 along with the elections to the sole Lok Sabha seat of Puducherry.
The seat, considered a bastion of AINRC founder and former Chief Minister N. Rangasamy, was won by DMK candidate K. Venkatesan by a margin of 1,539 votes.
While Mr. Venkatesan secured 10,906 votes, AINRC nominee P. Nedounzejiane bagged 9,367 votes.
The win also marks a dramatic turnaround for the DMK whose candidate had lost deposit in the 2016 Assembly elections.
The Thattanchavady constituency was represented by Mr. Rangasamy from 1991 to 2011 while he was a member of the Congress party. When the constituency was bifurcated, he moved to Kadirgamam.
Mr. Rangasamy fielded Ashok Anand from Thattanchavady as the candidate of his then fledgling All India N.R. Congress in the 2011 Assembly elections.
Mr. Anand had won the seat in his first electoral battle with a considerable margin, and again repeated the feat in 2016, winning by a margin of 7,458 votes. The bypoll was necessitated after a CBI special court convicted the legislator in a disproportionate assets case.
That the AINRC attached much prestige to this byelection was obvious when Mr. Rangasamy chose his nephew Mr. Nedounzejiane as the candidate. The loss, therefore, is all the more stinging for the AINRC and its supremo even as it comes as a morale booster for the DMK.
With the win, DMK’s strength in the Assembly also goes up from two to three.
Heated arguments
The counting also witnessed heated exchanges between AINRC workers and DMK-Congress-CPI workers over alleged discrepancy in the process. The AINRC workers staged a brief protest inside the counting centre.
