Jayalalithaa drops 9 sitting MPs

Only two sitting AIADMK members of the 13th Lok Sabha""TTV Dinakaran from Periy-akulam and S Murugesan from Tenkasi (SC)""have been renominated to the 33 Lok Sabha seats the AIADMK is contesting as part of the AIADMK-BJP alliance in the forthcoming elections.

AIADMK chief J Jayalalithaa announced the candidates' list today, apparently starting out from a clean slate. All the other candidates barring these two MPs, are new faces.

The claims of senior AIADMK leaders like R Saroja, leader of the AIADMK Parliamentary Party, party treasurer Dindigul N Srinivasan, PH Pandiyan, K Malaisamy and TM Selvaganapathy, have been overlooked.

Barring OS Maniam, one of the AIADMK's organising secretaries, other office-bearers have also not been fielded by the party.

The leaders, J Jayalalithaa has passed over, are not non-entities. Pandian has been the Speaker of the Tamil Nadu Assembly and was till about six months ago, the leader of the AIADMK legislature party when he was abruptly replaced by R Saroja. Pandian, a lawyer by training, was considered a formidable presence in the Assembly.

Similarly, K Malaisamy has been the chief secretary and former chief electoral officer in the state. He too, has been axed.

One reason for the arbitrary replacement of MPs could be that in the 1999 Jayalalithaa had fought the election as an ally of the Congress, after previously having supported the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

It was Jayalalithaa's group that voted against the 13-month Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in 1998, leading to a general election in 1999 that Jayalalithaa fought along with the Congress.

This move""a change of allies ""could have prompted the radical change of faces with whom to go into battle this time around.

But one thing is clear, the AIADMK has done well by changing allies. Since 1952, no Dravidian party in Tamil Nadu has fought on so many seats on its own as the AIADMK this time. This marks a watershed of sorts for the future of the Dravidian politics in the state.

The seat allocation makes the victory of the AIADMK in at least one seat, certain. Murugesan had won the 1999 Lok Sabha elections by about 880 votes in the Tenkasi (SC) constituency narrowly defeating the BJP at a time when the BJP and the AIADMK were ranged against each other.

This is the seat the BJP was hoping to be given, but Jayalalithaa disappointed it. Now with a consolidation of the BJP and the AIADMK votes, Murugesan is likely to trounce the DMK candidate.