• Mother of all Elections
  
  It was a fight to finish all the way on 11th May when the TN election results were announced. Finally the veteran 81 year old leader Kalaingar prevailed over the iron lady and took the coveted chair for a record fifth time and in the process winning the lections personally for the 11th time since 1959. It was one of the closest elections in recent memory in terms of victory margins never before seen in TN History and some of them were nail biting finishes like T.Nagar, Mylapore and Harbour
  
  Here are some unusual interesting facts I gathered over the last few days
  
  First time I guess non DMK party won more than 3 seats in Chennai and that too 7 by AIADMK alliance, may be the Veeranam factor played a role and also a minority government taking office which is a first for TN
  There were nearly seventeen constituencies where the margins were less than 100, the lowest one being 14 and there were at least three instances where the victory margins was just 53
  at least another 30+ seats had less than 1000 as the victory margin and must have been heart breaking for the losers
  Captain Vijayakanth simply stole the show with 27 lakhs+votes and an 8.34% share. He is indeed the David amongst the heavyweight Goliaths like Kalaingar and Amma. I don't think even the great MGR had such spectacular results in his first election. At least in 60-70 seats his party got more votes than the victory margins and who knows if Amma had tied up with him she might be laughing her way to glory today again. Some times super ego in politics can lead the party no where and her reluctance to accommodate Captain is a classic example
  BJP was a cropper with less than 2 % votes and may be managed to retain deposits in 2-3 places max and so was Karthik's forward block which only started marching backwards the movement he was chosen as the leader. At least with AIADMK alliance they would have retained 1-2 seats like Udumalapet. They have failed to open their account in both Kerala and TN and time for them to do a serious introspection rather than making some meaningless statements like the one from Naidu as he only can.
  PMK fared no better garnering vote share of around 5.20 % much lesser as compared to earlier elections and lost even in their strongholds like Tinidvanam and Vridhachalam where the party was actually started getting trounced by the Captain himself. Just goes to show you can't run a party purely on caste lines and those days are finished
  The losers I guess were actors like Visu, Saratkumar, Radhika etc who made the last minute dash to the AMMA camp and were undone by MK's Doosra
  The perennial infighters in TN, the Congress won 35 seats which was a bonus to them by any stretch of imagination and since they are on outside support mode I am sure would start their tantrums and bargains as a tit for tat for what Kalaignar did when they came to power at Centre
  Hope the DMK Govt losts its full tenure to fulfill the long list of Freebies it has promised and I am sure the most worried man at this moment must be the new Finance Secretary of TN
  
  RK