Chennai: The just-concluded Assembly elections in four states and one Union territory, as well as eight bypolls across six states threw up some unexpected results.
The BJP conquered West Bengal for the first time, stunning the three-time Trinamool Congress (TMC) government with 208 seats in the 294-strong Assembly. Down south, actor-politician Vijay’s new party Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) upset the applecarts of ruling DMK and AIADMK by winning 108 seats out of 234.
There were some sensational individual results as well.
P R Periyakaruppan, a minister in the outgoing DMK cabinet, can count himself to be the unluckiest person among all candidates who contested the elections last month.
Periyakaruppan lost by the slimmest of margins – yes, just one vote separated the winner and loser in Tamil Nadu’s Tiruppattur constituency.
At the other end of the scale, Sunetra Pawar of NCP won the Baramati byelection in Maharashtra by a resounding margin of 218,034 votes!
The Baramati seat had fallen vacant following the death of her husband Ajit Pawar in a plane crash on January 28. Sunetra, who replaced Ajit as deputy chief minister, thus scripted a record of the biggest victory margin in any Assembly election in India.
Sunetra did better than previous record-holder Sunil Kumar Sharma, who had won the 2022 Uttar Pradesh Assembly election by a margin of 2,14,835 votes. Sunetra also surpassed Ajit’s victory margin of 1,65,265 votes in the 2019 Assembly polls.
As for Periyakaruppan, the DMK leader received 83,374 votes while the tally of TVK’s Sreenivasa Sethupathy was 83,375!
Such a razor-thin defeat has set the DMK thinking. The party may challenge the result, and is exploring legal options as well.
and is expected to challenge the election result in the Madras High Court within a week.
DMK’s leadership and its legal wing have convened to discuss filing a petition for a recount. The legal team wants to verify if the total number of votes counted matches the total number of voters who cast their ballots before moving the Madras High Court.
There is a hung assembly in Tamil Nadu as TVK (108) fell 10 short of the majority mark. DMK won 59 seats, AIADMK 47 and Congress 5, PMK 4 and others 11.
Vijay will have to tie up with some other party for support to claim fotmation of government.
