Previous TN vote share may cost Congress seats for LS polls

The Indian National Congress (INC) lacks what matters the most in electoral politics – vote share. The party’s share of votes in the state does not inspire confidence, at least in the last decade when it failed to impress voters even while being in alliance with the DMK.

The party had only secured a meagre 4.37 per cent of votes in 2014 LS polls, which it had contested alone in TN. In the game of elections where scoring big mean a lot, the national party managed a strike rate of 20 per cent in the 2016 Assembly election. It won just eight of the 41 seats it had contested with an overall vote share of 6.42 per cent. The DMK hit a half century, winning 88 of the 180 seats in an election the two had contested together after the divorce in 2014.

A combination of factors like emergence of the DMDK, split engineered by TMC’s G K Vasan, unpopularity among Tamil nationalist constituency, failure of state party leadership to strengthen the organisation and lack of interest from the national high command, which was content with finding strong alliance partners from Tamil Nadu for parliamentary polls, have contributed to the fall of Congress here.

It is widely believed in the DMK circles that apportioning more seats to the Congress in both 2011 and 2016 had cost them victory, at least in the latter election. Going by the strike rate, Stalin, if he had stuck to the original 25-seat offer made to the national party, would have had an additional 10 seats in his kitty, remarked a DMK senior, requesting anonymity.

“The victory in Hindi heartland will give a momentum, but it will not widen their party base here. The reality in Tamil Nadu is different. We have to carry them,” the DMK leader opined.