“I am the alternative now. They [people] have immense and spontaneous faith in me.” This was what DMDK founder Vijayakant told The Hindu a month before he launched the party in September 2005. True to his word, he made every effort in the initial years to present his party as an alternative to the principal players in Tamil Nadu — the DMK and the AIADMK.
However, the subsequent turn of events showed that he could not sustain his party as a force to reckon with. The DMDK came to be known as a spoiler in the 2006 and 2016 Assembly elections, apart from the 2009 Lok Sabha election. In 2006 and 2009, the DMDK fielded candidates in all constituencies. Barring Vijayakant, no other party nominee won in 2006, whereas the organisation did not win a single seat three years later. These two experiences perhaps made Vijayakant to abandon the path of going it alone in the State-wide elections and since 2011, the DMDK faced the elections only in the company of other parties, including the AIADMK on two occasions: the 2011 Assembly election and the 2019 Lok Sabha election.
In the 2006 election, the DMK and the AIADMK had direct contests in 115 constituencies, of which the DMK bagged 81 and the AIADMK 34. In 63 constituencies, the DMDK’s vote share was higher than the victory margin. Though its overall vote share was about 8.4%, the party secured a double-digit vote share in seven districts, and missed the 10%-mark narrowly in Kancheepuram and Virudhunagar. Contrary to the popular perception that an alliance with the DMDK would have made a difference to the prospects of the AIADMK which lost power then, a post-poll study conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) revealed that less than 25% of Vijayakant’s supporters backed the AIADMK in the 2004 Lok Sabha poll and well over two-thirds of those who had voted for the DMDK in 2006 favoured the DMK alliance two years earlier.
