The Congress and DMK on Wednesday sealed a seatsharing deal for Tamil Nadu and Puducherry for the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections, a day after the BJP agreed to be part of an AIADMK-led coalition in the state.The Congress will contest from nine of Tamil Nadu’s 39 seats and the lone Lok Sabha constituency in the Union territory. DMK leader MK Stalin made the announcement in the presence of Congress leaders Mukul Wasnik and KC Venugopal. “Identifying the constituencies to be allotted to allies will be decided after discussions with our partners,” Stalin said.The announcement of the DMKCongress alliance means a polarisation of the Tamil Nadu election arena, with most parties aligning with either of the Dravidian parties, leaving out recent upstarts such as VK Sasikala’s nephew TTV Dhinakaran and actor-turned-politician Kamal Haasan to strike out on their own. The DMK alliance is supported by the two communist parties, the VCK, and the Indian Union Muslim League. The AIADMK has by its side the PMK, which holds sway in several northern districts, and other smaller parties, besides the BJP which will contest from five seats.Much similar to how a clutch of regional parties, including MDMK, VCK and DMDK, banded together in the 2016 state assembly elections and split the votes that could have all flowed to the DMK, Dhinakaran could hurt the AIADMK by pandering to its traditional vote bank, eventually benefitting the DMK.N Sathiya Moorthy, a political analyst and director of the Chennai chapter of the Observer Research Foundation, said: “Dhinakaran has been harping on about how the AIADMK-BJP-PMK poll deal is a betrayal of (former chief minister J) Jayalalithaa’s political beliefs. That could cause some reverberations. If it turns into a substantial vote-share, even if he does not win, the DMK combine can benefit from that.”Analysts expect the relevance of small parties such as Dhinakaran’s AMMK and Kamal Haasan’s outfit to diminish in the view of the state electoral fray turning into a two-cornered contest: “Dhinakaran’s focus will be primarily assembly by-polls, considering his perceived strength in certain pockets of the Cauvery Delta region and southern districts, crucial to prove his stated position as challenge to the Dravidian parties,” said Jhon Arockiasamy, a perception strategist for political parties.