Chennai, Oct 15 (IANS): Tamil Nadu's ruling DMK has recorded a thumping victory in the rural local body polls in nine districts, winning 138 out of the 140 district panchayat union seats.
The main opposition AIADMK could only get two seats, in its second major drubbing after the 2021 Assembly elections.
The DMK-led front also led in the panchayat union councillor posts, winning 1,021 out of the 1,380 seats with the AIADMK a distant second with only 214 seats.
Interestingly, the 'Third Front' or rather parties like Kamal Haasan's MNM, actor-director Seeman's NTK, T.T.V. Dhinakaran's AMMK, Dr S. Ramadoss' PMK, and actor-turned-politician Vijayakant's DMDK fared poorly.
The PMK won 47 councillor seats, AMMK four, the DMDK one, while the rest, including Seeman and Kamal Haasan's outfits could not secure even one.
"The drubbing by the people of these vote splitters is a clear message. Either they are part of a Dravidian movement or else they perish. Independent political parties cannot survive in Tamil Nadu and they can exist only as a coalition partnerd of either of the major parties, the DMK or the AIADMK," political analyst and Chennai private college Professor, Dr Uma Maheshwari told IANS.
All the parties, in the run up to the elections, had expressed high confidence in their winning prospects but the results proved something different.
C. Rajeev of Chennai think tank, Centre for Policy and Development Studies, told IANS that it "is high time leaders of these political parties including Kamal Haasan understand that unless a party has have a proper electoral policy and a manifesto, people will not support them. Even the seats won by these parties may be due to the performance of their individual leaders due to his/her influence in the locality rather than attributing to the policies and programmes of these parties.
"People of Tamil Nadu are highly literate as far as elections are concerned and they will teach betrayers a lesson and those ready for vote-splitting will also be shown their place and this has exactly what happened in these polls."