The DMK on Friday won the Vellore Lok Sabha seat after its candidate DM Kathir Anand defeated his AIADMK rival AC Shanmugam by a slim margin of over 8,000 votes. Anand polled 4,85,340 votes, while Shanmugam received 4,77,199 votes. The AIADMK candidate had ledt in the early rounds of the counting.
The voting for Vellore Lok Sabha seat had taken place on Monday and the results will be out any time today. The election for Vellore was suspended in this year’s Lok Sabha polls after Rs 10 crore was seized from the possession of DMK leaders in the constituency.
The DMK had gone on to win 37 out of 38 Lok Sabha seats that went to polls on 18 April this year.
Chief Minister EK Palaniswami and Deputy Chief Minister O Panneerselvam had led the campaign for the AIADMK candidate while DMK President MK Stalin had spearheaded the campaign for Kathir Anand.
There were 28 candidates in the fray.
The DMK’s vote share in Vellore stood at 47.33 percent, while the AIADMK was close behind with 46.51 percent.
Local correspondents say that the DMK should have swept the polls in Vellore and Anand struggling to secure a victory is a sign that the complacency has cost the party a great deal. There’s a huge resentment among the party over promoting nepotism since Anand himself is a son a senior DMK leader Durai Murugan. For ground-level party workers, according to experts, ‘hopelessness and helplessness has become a striking feature of the DMK politics.