CHENNAI: Now that the battle lines are more or less drawn for the elections to the local bodies, scheduled for October 17 and 19, it looks that they will turn out to be historic in the sense that the outcome will reveal the actual popularity and vote-getting abilities of every political party in Tamil Nadu.Ever since coalition politics became a norm or rather an inevitability, elections have been fought by alliances and not individual parties, making assessment of vote banks near impossible. The various permutations and combinations of political parties in successive polls at all levels have been so intriguing or mind-boggling that people’s actual priorities was incomprehensible.Speculations like “if that party had joined hands with that one, then it would have been different” had been a common refrain by those making postmortem of elections in the past.As a party’s vote share in a constituency had to be calculated on the basis of combined figures of votes polled by an alliance,it had been difficult to ascertain if a particular constituency continued to be the pocket borough of a particular party or not. It was also the case while working out the overall vote percentage of a party in an election. Of course, the vote share of some smaller parties like the DMDK, MDMK and BJP, which have faced the hustings on their own strength, could be counted from the records. But those parties have invariably come a cropper in all elections that their polling figures are irrelevant in the context of an electoral analysis. While it an open secret that the Congress has scant following in the State, it has been riding piggyback on one of the two major parties — the AIADMK or DMK — in all elections, thus making it impossible to figure out the support base of the national party.In fact, no one actually knows how many people preferred the AIADMK and the DMK in the past for the mandates had been given only for their alliances.Now, for the first time in recent electoral history, the AIADMK and DMK are going it alone in the elections, forcing all the sundry parties that were hitherto their allies to try their luck in their individual capacity. In the present scenario, the MDMK and PMK are in no coalition and the only chances for tie-ups are between the two Left parties and the DMDK and Congress, the latter being a remote possibility. Looking at it differently, the election results would, in all probablity, reaffirm the sweeping popularity of the ruling AIADMK going by the assembly election results. But it would also help the other parties know where exactly they stand.
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