Chennai: Tamilisai Soundararajan, who resigned as the governor of Telangana and lieutenant governor of Puducherry to return to electoral politics and contest the Lok Sabha polls in Tamil Nadu on a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ticket, is trailing in the Chennai South constituency.
As of 11.16 am, Soundararajan, former Tamil Nadu BJP chief, has secured 8,915 votes against Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s (DMK) sitting MP Thamizhachi Thangapandian, leading with 15,063 votes. All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) candidate J. Jayavardhan has received 5,097 votes and is currently in the third position.
Soundararajan’s return to politics was expected to boost the BJP’s position in the state’s political landscape, where the party has been trying to make inroads.
Soundararajan, 62, has been a successful arbitrator and orator, but this would be her sixth electoral failure. In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, she lost to DMK’s Kanimozhi by a margin of over 3 lakh votes. She also unsuccessfully contested the 2006, 2011 and 2016 assembly polls and the 2009 Lok Sabha polls. However, her vote share had risen over the years.
In 2006, Soundararajan finished fourth in the Radhapuram assembly constituency with 4.7 percent votes. Five years later, she stood third at Velachery with a vote share of 4.63 percent.
In 2016, her vote share rose to 11.19 percent in Virugampakkam, even though she finished behind AIADMK and DMK candidates. In the 2009 Lok Sabha polls, she had secured 3.54 percent of votes from Chennai North.
Soundararajan’s tenure as Telangana governor was marked by controversies due to her frequent run-ins with the previous Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) government.
In March 2023, the BRS-led government moved the Supreme Court against her, seeking directions to the governor to clear 10 pending bills. According to the government, seven of the ten bills had been pending for over six months. Soundararajan then went on to clear three bills within a month.
In Chennai South, a DMK stronghold, writer-turned-politician Thamizhachi won with over 5 lakh votes against her AIADMK rival in 2019. Since 1957, the constituency has elected DMK candidates as MPs seven times, followed by Congress (four) and AIADMK (two).
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