Chennai, May5 : Voters of Kanyakumari vote out Suresh Rajan of DMK ,who would have minister in the State Cabinet if elected , and reject Lok Sabha candidate of BJP who would be a Cabinet minister once again in Modi ministry. Surprise does not stop here. They elect an AIADMK candidate in Kanyakumar Assembly and BJP man in Nagercoil constituency, which forms bulk of Lok Sabha voters but vote for a Congress man as MP who will sit in Opposition benches.
Usually, the belief is that voters think differently when voting for State and Lok Sabha polls. Also the past voting patterns have shown that Tamil Nadu electorate plumps for ruling party candidate in a by-poll. The first belief comes wrong. Nagercoil and Kanyakumari constituencies that form the biggest chunk of voters in the Kanyakumari Lok Sabha constituency vote for AIADMK- BJP. Suresh Rajan of DMK who won always bucked any wave against his party and remained the `eternal’ favourite of the voters of the District Capital was bundled out. The humiliation was that he lost not to AIADMK man but to BJP’S lesser known Gandhi. In the same pattern, voters plumped for Thalaival Sundaram of AIADMK and booted out DMK’s Austin. No surprise as this seat is considered a two leaves bastion as it won seven times from here.
Going by the trend for voting for ruling party, Pon Radhakrishnan who is seeking re-election on a BJP ticket should have won hands down. In 2019 Lok Sabha poll, there was a belief that Congress and allies were coming back to power in Delhi. Tamil Nadu voted for DMK- Congress in a massive way and Ponnar lost to Vasanthkumar . He cried foul and blamed it on the DMK Goebbels. As Union Minister, he used MP funds to help the constituency and the Highways ministry to build four lane expressway, flyovers and started groundwork for an airport . All this was washed away as fishermen felt that the container port coming up at Kovalam ( not the beach in Kerala’s Thiruvanthapiram) would uproot them from the land that their forefather’s made their home. Kovalam International Container Transshipment Terminal (KICTT) has led to many protest groups to emerge and BJP is citing the fact that all these groups are led by Christians has not cut much ice with other castes.
The developmental works helped BJP to get Nagercoil but Ponnar lost his opportunity to be Union Minister again. Though Ponnar says that new site Kovalam has no villages in the 14 km radius of the proposed port, NGO’s show proof of villages in the region and they being reclassified as only hamlets to get environmental clearance. The 100 yr old St Ignatius church in Kovalam too falls in this 15 kn radius of the zone which has to have no residents., The KICTT project should have been given a burial like AIADMK did to Adani run Kattukapulli port expansion in North Chennai. This would have given a new birth to Ponnar and BJP.
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