Udhayanidhi tops by covering 8,465 km during campaign tour
CHENNAI: Election is as much about doing legwork as making poll promises and criticising political rivals. The just concluded parliamentary polls showed that the heavyweights of Tamil Nadu politics have done the hard miles, of course with the comfort of their caravan-like campaign vans, in the sweltering heat to an extent even the backpackers would envy.
State Sports Minister and DMK youth wing secretary Udhayanidhi Stalin is said to be topping the list of politicians who criss-crossed the length and breadth of the state to woo voters. Udhayanidhi, the DMK claimed, covered an exhausting 8,465 km in the 24-day-long campaign. Udhayanidhi had visited 122 Assembly constituencies spread across all 38 districts of the state.
Emerging runner up was Leader of Opposition and AIADMK general secretary Edappadi K Palaniswami, who, according to the DMK, had covered 7,720 km spread across 55 Assembly constituencies in 33 districts in 24 days. Going by an elaborate statement released by the ruling DMK in this regard on Tuesday, BJP state president K Annamalai might have finished a distant third at 3,264 km in 20 days, covering 25 Assembly constituencies in 18 districts.
While the numbers claimed by the DMK are debatable, there is no denying that Stalin junior ran the long miles to compensate for his Chief Minister-father MK Stalin who restricted his spirited campaign to addressing 20 mega rallies covering all Parliamentary constituencies. The DMK statement, which was circulated with the intention to project Udhayanidhi as the poster boy of DMK this election, highlighted his ‘Mr 29 paisa’ jab targeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the ‘AIIMS brick’ critique as the standout features of his high-decibel campaign, which also attracted the opposition’s wrath for some of his innocuous but pungent one-liners targeting the who’s who of the BJP and AIADMK.
The DMK summed up Udhayanidhi’s ‘successful’ campaign as a model for future elections. A DMK senior said on condition of anonymity that though the CM was the shining star of the campaign this time, Udhayanidhi complimented him and rightly got on the nerves of EPS and the BJP throughout his campaign.