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Jaya springs a surprise with her list

All Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazagham supremo Jayalalitha Jayaram sprang a surprise of sorts on Monday by announcing the candidature of over-the-hill film star Ramarajan for the prestigious Thiruchendur parliamentary constituency, from where Union Minister and Tamil Maanila Congress leader Dhanushkodi Adithan is expected to seek re-election for the fifth time.

Ramarajan, once appealing to the rural film goers with his village- based themes and also his unabashed worshipping of the late M G Ramachandran, and Jayalalitha, both on-screen and off-screen, had left the party in between. That was before Jayalalitha herself lost the 1996 poll, but he returned to the party some time back, mainly with the hope of reviving his career.

Among the other star contenders for the AIADMK are former assembly speaker Sedappati R Muthiah (Periyakulam), former Lok Sabha deputy speaker M Thambiduari (Karur), and former state minister D Jayakumar (Madras Central) and V Sathyamurthy (Ramanathapuram). Three time former MP Kadambur Janarthanam has been fielded again in Tirunelveli, where the the AIADMK held its state conference recently, and which seat he had lost in 1996.

"We will win all the 23 seats we are contesting, and so will our allies, the 17 seats allotted to them," Jayalalitha declared at a crowded press conference, while releasing the list of AIADMK nominees, and also the seat sharing pattern with the allies. She also released the list of party nominees for the three assembly bye-elections being held simultaneously with the Lok Sabha poll. Included in the list were the nominees for the Pondicherry Lok Sabha seat, and the Muslim assembly seat, also in the Union Territory.

More than the party nominee, it's the seat sharing that was at the centre of media attention in the past fortnight. Under the agreement, the AIADMK will contest 23 seats, including Pondicherry, the BJP, PMK and the MDMK five each. The Vazhappadi Ramamurthy-led Tamizhaga Rajiv Congress and the Janata Party of Subramanian Swamy get one seat each.

By concluding a hasty alliance with the three major partners, and taking her time to finalise the seat sharing, Jayalalitha has shown a steel hand under a velvet glove. The haste ensured that the allies had nowhere else to go. But the final decision on seat sharing has made it clear, as to who is the boss and who really calls the shots in the alliance.

Though Jayalalitha seemed to look the other way when the BJP announced its candidates for four constituencies, including Coimbatore, on which the MDMK too had its eyes, she has made sure that the party did not get the coveted Salem seat for former Union minister P Rangarajan Kumaramangalam, who had joined the BJP after leaving the Congress only with this in mind.

Instead, the BJP now gets Tiruchi as its fifth seat, where a concentration of brahmin voters make it that much attractive for the party but the presence of a formidable candidate from the DMK-TMC combine, namely sitting MP S Adaikalaraj, has made it that much more difficult for the BJP.

Jayalalitha seemed to have accommodated the smaller parties well. The PMK has been given five seats; of them in three (Chidambaram, Dharmapuri and Vandavasi) the party has a fighting chance, going by the votes polled last time. She also gave a free hand to both Vazhappadi Ramamurthy (Salem) and Subramanian Swamy (Madurai) in the choice of constituencies, as they confined their claims to one seat each. She would not also like to turn away the two foes turned friends, as they would make for a good showpiece before her party cadre.

Left unhappy in the whole bargain is the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam of V Gopalswamy, who however gets the Sivakasi seat, from where he had contested the last time. Joining hands with the AIADMK early on, when both were down in the dumps after the 1996 poll, the MDMK had raised hopes among its cadres that it would get a fair deal from the AIADMK, whenever an election was held.

This had led the MDMK to believe that the party could put its feet down and claim up to 10 seats, even after the BJP and the PMK had joined the alliance. Internal contradictions and individual claims from within the party had pressurised the leadership into keep talking tough with the AIADMK until it was too late. And to no avail.

Under the formula announced by Jayalalitha, the MDMK now gets Palani, Thanjavur, Tindivanam and Madras North, apart from Sivakasi, respectively earmarked for senior party leaders S Kannappan, L Ganesan, Chenji Ramachandran, Maduranthagam Arunmugan and, of course, Gopalswamy. Of them, only Gopalswamy and Ramachandran have got the seats of their choice, while other senior leaders like Pon Muthuramalingam have been left to lick their wounds, with no seats.

The MDMK leadership is known to have adopted the carrot and stick policy till the very and at least to wrech an additional seat out of the AIADMK, if only to show its cadres that it mattered more to the AIADMK than the PMK and the BJP. But that's not to be.

Says an MDMK source, "Our leadership was talking tough for over a week after the BJP had announced its first list of four candidates, when it was known what we would get only five seats. But the end result, where our party has been handed down some 'unfavourable' constituencies against earlier expectations, only shows how we have failed in the second round even though we won the first by aligning with AIADMK."

For her part, Jayalalitha has denied problems in seat sharing and she also denied that the AIADMK was insistent on contesting 23 seats, adding up to five, her new lucky number against the earlier nine. "Even 40 is my lucky number," she said with a smile.

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