india

Updated: Jun 04, 2019 19:18 IST

A month after the Lok Sabha polls and bye-election to 22 vacant assembly seats, Tamil Nadu is gearing up for the local bodies polls which are overdue by three years.

The ruling AIADMK and opposition DMK have activated their poll machinery at the grass root level after the State Election Commission (SEC) announcing that it will hold the elections in August,

Also preparing to occupy the political space through the civic bodies are actor-turned-politician Kamal Haasan’s MNM, rebel AIADMK leader TTV Dhinakaran’sAMMK and filmmaker Seeman’s ultra nationalist NTKNeither of these parties won a Lok Sabha seat or the Assembly bypoll but secured substantial vote share of around 4% to 5%.

According to DMK MLA Maa Subramaniam, a former Mayor of Chennai, the DMK will once again make a clean sweep in the local body polls as it did in the Lok Sabha polls.

“The local body polls should have been conducted in 2016 August itself. However, the state government was not prepared to hold them as it was afraid of a rout. After marathon legal battle, the DMK secured the judicial nod for conducting the elections. Since the DMK-led secular alliance has swept the LS poll, we are confident of a sweep in the local body polls too,” he said.

Subramanian further said that the AIADMK may further postpone the elections.

“Though we are ready to face local body polls at any time, the AIADMK which seems hopeless may again cancel the election. They can cite drought-like condition as the reason for cancelling the elections,” he said.

In order to work out the strategy for the civic polls, AIADMK co-ordinators, Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami and Deputy CM O Panneerselvam, have already met party district secretaries along with respective MLAs of each district.

According to a senior minister who attended the AIADMK meeting, party MLAs were urged to find winnable candidates so that they could be fielded in the city corporations, municipalities, town panchayats, district panchayat wards and union panchayat wards.

“Despite the loss in the LS polls, we have performed better in the assembly bypoll. In the absence of our charismatic leader Jayalalithaa, the party has managed to win in nine out of the 22 seats,” the minister said.

Both the DMK and the AIADMK would face the elections with the same alliance without any change. The DMK combine comprises the Congress, (MDMK), VCK, Communist Party of India (CPI), Communist Party of India –Marxist (CPI-M), Indhiya Jananayaga Katchi (IJK), Kongu Nadu Makkal Desiya Katchi (KNMDK), a party of the OBC Gounders, and Indian Union Muslim League (IUML).

The alliance partners of the AIADMK are the BJP, the OBC Vanniyar-dominant PMK, actor Vijayakanth’s DMDK, Puthiya Thamilagam (PT), a Dalit party, Tamil Maanila Congress - Moopanar (TMC-M).

Initially, the SEC had announced the schedule for the local body elections soon after the AIADMK won the 2016 assembly poll. However, the DMK approached Madras High Court seeking to rectify the irregularities in the ward delimitation works prior to holding the elections. Though the irregularities were corrected later, the AIADMK was not ready to hold the polls after the death of AIADMK supremo J Jayalalithaa. And this had resulted in the stoppage of Central funding for the civic bodies.

Though the high court directed the SEC to conduct local body polls in November 2017, the SEC had then said that it was not in a position to conduct the polls as district administration officers were busy in preparing for the Lok Sabha elections.

Subsequently, the DMK knocked at the doors of the judiciary and in March, the SEC informed the high court that it would issue the notification in May. And on Sunday, the notification was published along with the delimitation exercise as per the 2011 census.