With 9 seats in bag, EPS wards off threat to Tamil Nadu government, for now

CHENNAI: Tamil Nadu CM Edappadi K Palaniswami has withstood yet another acid test with AIADMK winning the required nine out of the 22 assembly seats where bypolls were held. There is no major threat to his government now. The ruling party has 117 MLAs — excluding the speaker and five rebels — in the 234-member House.
In the light of the threat posed by the rebels and the no-confidence motion proposed against the speaker, the ruling party needed to win nine seats and the party has just about managed it.
For now, the chief minister would not be unduly worried about the revolt of five AIADMK rebels. “EPS and OPS have proven beyond doubt that they represent the real AIADMK. With TTV Dhinakaran’s AMMK faring poorly in the bypolls, new desertions and activation of the so-called sleeper cells he has been talking about are unlikely to happen,” said analyst M Kasinathan.
The nine newly-elected MLAs being Edappadi’s choice, they are unlikely to switch camps. Moreover, since the elections have exhausted all the AIADMK leaders, they are not psychologically and financially ready to face yet another election. DMK president M K Stalin, perhaps, failed to understand Edappadi’s game plan. Focused on cobbling together a government headed by Rahul Gandhi at the Centre, Stalin lost focus on his immediate task in hand. In the process, he has lost yet another opportunity to pull down the shaky AIADMK government in Tamil Nadu.
Power has virtually slipped through Stalin’s fingers. Crafty Palaniswami, knowing well it was an arduous task to garner votes in Tamil Nadu to prop up a Modi government at the Centre, set his focus right from the beginning on winning as many assembly seats as possible in the byelections to safeguard his chair.
Even the grand alliance for the LS polls was formed keeping the assembly bypolls in mind. He put considerable amount of resources to work in the 22 assembly seats to put the brakes on the DMK juggernaut. Despite Dhinakaran eating into the thevar vote base of AIADMK and DMK walking away with the minority votes, Palaniswami remained focused, believing in his strengths and doing things he is good at.
The AIADMK government had looked precarious ever since Jayalalithaa’s demise in December 2016. Coming together for power and to keep their common enemy Dhinakaran at bay, Edappadi and his deputy O Panneerselvam have steered the government through turbulent waters for two years. The byelections were forced on the ruling party by Dhinakaran, who engineered defection of 18 AIADMK MLAs.
The next assembly elections are two years away, which is very long a period in politics. The opposition parties may not get such a conducive opportunity once again to pull down the government. Palaniswami has enough time to graduate from chief minister of Salem to chief minister of Tamil Nadu