Chennai: The result of the by-election for Chennai’s RK Nagar assembly constituency, which fell vacant after the death of former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa last December, were declared today. Independent candidate TTV Dhinakaran, who was sidelined from the AIADMK by the EPS and OPS faction, won the prestigious and much-sought-after RK Nagar assembly seat. TTV Dhinakaran was evicted from the AIADMK along with VK Sasikala following a deal between AIADMK’s factions led by E Palaniswami (EPS) and former Chief Minister O Panneerselvam (OPS), as they merged in August. Mr Dhinakaran and Ms Sasikala have challenged that decision and claim to lead the real AIADMK, though their support within the party is dwindling. Even the Election Commission awarded the AIADMK’s ‘two-leaves’ party symbol to EPS and OPS, calling them the real AIADMK, but the Sasikala-Dhinakaran camp have stood their ground. Claiming victory after the initial rounds of counting, Mr Dhinakaran, who took a virtually unassailable lead of over 45,000 votes, said: “We are the real AIADMK. People of RK Nagar have voted Amma’s successor.” He went on to say that his projected win in the RK Nagar bypoll was “(the) best gift to (party founder) MGR and Amma (Jayalalithaa).” Losing the high-profile RK Nagar assembly constituency, would be considered a setback for the E Palaniswami-led AIADMK and will send a message that him and his deputy O Panneerselvam might not be in complete control after the split from the Sasikala-Dhinakaran camp. The AIADMK have fielded senior leader E Madhusudanan, who has held the seat before. A loss at RK Nagar would also be a jolt for the DMK, whose working president MK Stalin had campaigned aggressively ahead of polling day. The DMK, which also had support from the Left parties and MDMK, is trailing at third place. MK Stalin chose RK Nagar resident and lawyer by profession Marudhu Ganesh as the DMK’s candidate. Voting for the high-profile RK Nagar constituency was held on December 21, and saw a record 77 per cent turnout in the by-election.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Chennai: The result of the by-election for Chennai’s RK Nagar assembly constituency, which fell vacant after the death of former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa last December, were declared today. Independent candidate TTV Dhinakaran, who was sidelined from the AIADMK by the EPS and OPS faction, won the prestigious and much-sought-after RK Nagar assembly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15437,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[315],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15436"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15441,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15436\/revisions\/15441"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}