Counting for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections are underway and as of 4:30 PM, the BJP is leading in 244 seats across India. While the party is yet to touch the magic number 272 on its own, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s third terms seems assured.
In Tamil Nadu, the BJP-led NDA has made incremental gains by coming second in around 10 seats. According to report, the BJP on its own has crossed a vote share of 10%.
However, the numbers emerging from the closely-watched Coimbatore Lok Sabha constituency reveals a picture that shows how 2 enemies have got together together defeat a common enemy.
The DMK’s Ganapathy Rajkumar is leading in the seat with 3.8 lakh votes and BJP’s Annamalai has emerged as the underdog with over 3.1 lakh votes trailing by over 78,000 votes (as of 6:45 PM).
ADMK’s Singai Ramachandran on the other hand has come distant third with just 1.6 lakh votes (trailing by more than 2.3 lakh votes).
It is to be noted that the Coimbatore has always been a ADMK bastion. The AIADMK had polled 431,717 votes in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
If we combine the votes of 5 Assembly constituencies (excluding Coimbatore South) coming within Coimbatore Lok Sabha constituency, the total number of votes ADMK has is 544238.
Going by these numbers, the ADMK should’ve atleast got 4 lakh votes easily. But it did not.
Even during the elections, both the DMK and the ADMK were trying to peddle a narrative that Annamalai was nowhere in the picture and that it was a contest between the two Dravidian parties.
But the results indicate that that clearly hasn’t been the case. The contest which was expected to be a three-way contest is clearly bipolar.
On the day of elections, political observers noted that the presence of ADMK cadres at the booth level was missing.
Something is amiss in #AIADMK’s poll management in #Coimbatore and it’s showing in the booths too.
— Shabbir Ahmed (@Ahmedshabbir20) April 19, 2024
Given the abysmal performance of ADMK, it is clear that the party has ceded some of its votes to the DMK. Ganapathy Rajkumar is close to jailed DMK leader Senthibalaji who was earlier with the ADMK and still commands considerable influence in the region.
As they say, an enemy’s enemy is a friend. There seems to have been a tacit understanding between the two Dravidian parties (Pangalis) to keep BJP’s Annamalai at bay.
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