: Left alone in the Tamil Nadu electoral battle, the Congress has managed its lowest ever vote share in a Lok Sabha election with 38 of the 39 candidates set to lose their deposits.
As per trends available till 9 p.m. on Friday, the party managed to poll in about 4.2 per cent votes contesting all the seats in the State. The previous lowest was in 1998 when like in the present elections, the party was spurned by the Dravidian parties.
Star contestants who were expected to put up a good fight such as Karti Chidambaram in Sivaganga, Su. Thirunavukkarasar in Ramanathapuram, Mohan Kumaramangalam in Salem and R. Prabhu in Coimbatore all ended up losing their deposits. In most constituencies, the party finished fourth. The saving grace was Kanyakumari, where candidate H. Vasanth Kumar finished second and even led a few rounds early in the counting.
Senior leaders in the faction-riddled Tamil Nadu Congress said the poor performance was worse than 1998 when the party faced a vertical split with G.K. Moopanar forming the TMC two years earlier. “The party in 1998 was weak after the split and hence the drubbing was expected. Now, the full Congress has fared worse than the half Congress of 1998,” said a senior leader.
