Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
Vijay has won. The whistle has sounded twice across the northern plains and western corridors, and the verdict deserves neither a sour sulk nor a grudging asterisk. The Chief Minister’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) has captured two Scheduled Caste-reserved constituencies, raised its strength inside Fort St George from 107 to 109 and proved that its May 2026 debut was neither a flash in the pan nor a cinematic illusion. The applause from its cadres is real and earned.
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Yet, even as TVK bursts crackers and paints the town maroon and yellow, democracy may reasonably ask why it was conscripted into an expensive round trip.
Five months ago, Madurantakam and Dharapuram elected K Maragatham Kumaravel and P Sathyabama under the AIADMK’s Two Leaves. Within weeks of taking oath, both legislators resigned, joined the ruling TVK and created two avoidable vacancies. The Election Commission returned with its machinery; citizens returned to the queues; the same candidates won again and will now return to the same Assembly wearing different colours.
In our devotional vocabulary, a pradakshinam returns the pilgrim to the sanctum spiritually renewed. This secular circumambulation returned two ambitious politicians to the same House, merely electorally repainted. The candidates completed their politically advantageous circle. The law, imposing no automatic bar on an immediate return to the ballot, permitted the journey. The taxpayer, as always, picked up the fare.
BALLOT PAPERS WERE FRESH; BIOGRAPHIES WERE NOT
The calendar captures the absurdity. On May 11, Maragatham Kumaravel and Sathyabama took oath as AIADMK legislators. On May 13, they supported the TVK government in the confidence vote, defying the AIADMK whip. On May 25, they resigned and formally donned the TVK shawl. On October 6, their constituents were summoned to vote for them again. On October 9, the same individuals returned beneath the TVK whistle. The ballot papers were freshly printed; the biographies upon them were second-hand goods.
Legally, this was not the immaculate escape it might appear like. They did not resign before crossing the floor; they crossed it, tested the floorboards beneath Vijay’s government and then surrendered their seats. Resignation changed the route, not the chronology.
Resignation and disqualification are distinct constitutional mechanisms. A resignation does not vaporise an alleged act of defection committed earlier, and proceedings under the Tenth Schedule may survive it. But once the Speaker accepted their resignations—and no statutory disqualification prevented their candidatures—the two were legally free to seek a fresh mandate. The law permitted the return journey. It did not issue a certificate of ethical purity. The result changed the party affiliation of two seats. It did not change their occupants.
CONSENT AFTER COST: BALLOT AS A BILL
TVK’s democratic defence is straightforward: whatever voters thought in April, they have now consciously ratified the switch. In mass politics, the ballot box is the ultimate detergent; a decisive plurality washes away prior sins of opportunism.
Yet electoral ratification does not retrospectively erase democratic injury. Citizens were not consulted before their representatives discarded their mandates. They were recalled five months later to countersign party negotiations conducted beyond public view.
The voters validated the destination. That does not make the journey free. A mandate can be renewed by the voter. It cannot retrospectively be made costless.
Turnout fell by roughly seven percentage points in Madurantakam and nearly ten in Dharapuram. Agricultural demands, ordinary bypoll apathy and political fatigue may all have contributed; an aggregate figure cannot allocate the blame. But the contrast remains eloquent. The rallies grew louder; the electorate grew smaller. Whatever their individual reasons, thousands more stayed away from an election politics had chosen to repeat.
IF VIJAY ALONE CAN WIN, WHY BORROW THE WINNERS?
Here lies the central political contradiction: the paradox of borrowed clothes.
Since TVK entered Fort St George with 108 seats, its admirers have described Vijay’s charisma as an all-conquering tide. Local candidates, they suggest, are footnotes; the whistle and the Chief Minister can haul almost any nominee across the line.
If that appeal is truly self-sufficient, why recruit sitting legislators from Edappadi K Palaniswami’s depleted cupboard?
In April, TVK’s candidates had already polled a commanding 31 per cent in Madurantakam and a sturdy 23 per cent in Dharapuram despite the party being a first-time electoral force. With executive visibility and a substantial welfare programme now behind him, Vijay could have fielded two fresh grassroots candidates and tested whether his popularity could carry them. Victory would then have built two new leaders as well as two new majorities.
An invincible charisma has little need for borrowed armour.
The irony deepens because Vijay spent the campaign praising MGR and Jayalalithaa while claiming that their ideological mantle had slipped from Palaniswami’s hands. There is tactical brilliance in claiming the succession certificate of the Dravidian opposition. But TVK now garlands the ancestral portraits of MGR and Jayalalithaa while carrying away the mahogany furniture from the house they left behind.
Vijay dismissed the AIADMK as a theerndhu pona katchi—a spent party. If it is indeed exhausted, why must the party of the future mine its ruins for candidates? A movement promising to escape the habits of the Dravidian duopoly has embraced one of its oldest practices: cannibalising a wounded rival to enlarge its own ranks. A new party need not become a transit lounge for yesterday’s opportunisms.
VICTORY IN TWO DIFFERENT KEYS
The counting patterns warn against treating both victories as one monolithic wave.
In Madurantakam, TVK led from the opening rounds and steadily enlarged the gap, with the DMK second and AIADMK third. Maragatham’s local presence and the ruling alliance’s machinery reinforced Vijay’s appeal and converted an early advantage into a runaway lead.
Dharapuram told a harder tale. TVK trailed during the first four rounds as the AIADMK and DMK contested the lead. Sathyabama moved ahead only after Round 5 and then established a clear cushion. The western agrarian soil did not instantly melt before celluloid charm; it required candidate networks, local social coalitions and booth-level arithmetic. The same whistle produced two distinct echoes. Charisma can draw the crowd; political machinery still shapes the margin.
OPPOSITION’S UNCOMFORTABLE ARITHMETIC
For the established Opposition, October 9 provides little comfort.
To be pushed into third place in Madurantakam was painful for the AIADMK; to lose Dharapuram—a western seat it had reclaimed decisively only five months ago—is a deeper institutional blow. Its roughly one-fourth share in both seats shows that the cadre base has not vanished. But its leaders are travelling to TVK vastly faster than its voters. EPS sounded the bugle for revenge against the turncoats, only to discover that his garrison had already surrendered the keys.
The DMK finishes second in both seats, confirming that its organisational floor and welfare legacy remain substantial. But neither converted into victory. Welfare can create durable material goodwill; it cannot indefinitely substitute for political renewal. The DMK possesses an immovable floor but failed to locate the staircase.
Naam Tamilar Katchi and the Left received a sobering lesson in the limits of rhetorical purism and dialectical contortion. The Left supported Vijay’s government inside Fort St George while opposing his nominees outside it. The electorate, unimpressed by this exercise in running with the hare and hunting with the hounds, sent their candidates home without their deposits. One now wonders who those very few voters could be!
WHAT IS GEN Z BEING TAUGHT?
Vijay has built much of his political proposition around youth, freshness and impatience with the inherited Dravidian order. Many younger supporters see him as an antidote to a dynastic and exhausted duopoly.
What civic lesson does this bypolls teach them? That party loyalty is disposable property; that crossing over within weeks of an election becomes “shrewd statecraft” when the hero benefits; and that victory retrospectively excuses the somersault.
A younger electorate does not automatically create a newer politics. Political freshness is not a date of manufacture. It is the refusal to inherit old habits. Defection was supposed to be a relic of the old order; TVK has made it look like a pre-installed feature of the new upgrade.
THE UNREFORMED GAP
The grievance has already reached the Madras High Court. Advocate K Suthan sought an “Election Expenditure Security” to recover the public cost of such bypolls and a cooling-off disqualification for premature resigners. The court dismissed the petition because neither the Constitution nor the Representation of the People Act presently creates those penalties; a court cannot manufacture a new electoral disqualification by judicial command.
The constitutional gap is narrower than a simple resignation loophole, but it is real. The Tenth Schedule can pursue an alleged act of defection committed before resignation. What the law does not automatically do is prevent a legislator whose resignation has been accepted from immediately contesting the resulting bypoll. It can examine the somersault; it does not automatically cancel the return ticket. The Constitution can regulate a floor-crossing. It cannot supply a conscience at the crossing.
Parliament should examine a carefully drawn cooling-off provision, a same-House restriction or another safeguard against calculated mandate-hopping. Any reform must preserve a legislator’s right to resign and the voter’s freedom to re-elect, while ensuring that resignation does not become a prepaid ticket for changing parties at public expense.
VICTORY WITHOUT THE OLD VICES
Vijay deserves congratulations. He has won two seats, expanded his governing buffer and proved that his popularity can navigate distinct regional landscapes.
The mature use of this victory would be to ensure that it does not become a recruitment brochure for the next batch of floor-crossers.
Two legislators began their terms in the Assembly, wandered through opportunistic resignation, forced a redundant bypoll and returned to the same benches dressed in different colours. The circuit is complete. The winners performed their political pradakshinam. The voter paid for the procession.
Vijay has changed the party colours worn by two legislators; his larger promise to Tamil Nadu was to change politics itself.
– Ends
SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
