Resign, rejoin, repeat: Dharapuram's bypoll insults the voter

Tomorrow, the voters of Dharapuram and Madurantakam will queue up to elect legislators they already elected a few months ago. Think about that for a moment. In May this year, they voted. In May this year, their representatives resigned — barely three weeks after taking their seats. Now the state will spend crores conducting a fresh election, as if the people's verdict were a rough draft. This is not a by-election. It is a manufactured election — and everyone knows who manufactured it. P. Sathyabama won Dharapuram on an AIADMK ticket, resigned within weeks, joined the ruling TVK, and now asks the same voters to elect her again in new colours. Her counterpart in Madurantakam followed the same script. The mandate was not lost; it was discarded, the way one discards a costume between scenes. The defenders of this theatre will call it democracy in action — the people's right to re-decide. Do not be fooled. When a legislator resigns days after winning, it is not the people who have changed their minds; it is the legislator who has changed her price. The voter is reduced to a prop in a transaction negotiated elsewhere, and the ballot box becomes a laundromat for defections. Periyar taught that power must answer to the people, not purchase them. Anna built a movement on the dignity of the Tamil voter. What dignity is left when an election can be voided by one person's resignation letter? The anti-defection law was written precisely to stop this auction of mandates — yet its spirit is mocked every time a resignation is timed to serve the ruling party's arithmetic. TTV Dhinakaran, no friend of this paper, was right about one thing: the Election Commission should act against those who resign shortly after being elected. A legislator who quits within months of winning — without illness, without principle, only to recontest in ruling-party colours — should face a bar on contesting the resulting bypoll. The voter should not be summoned to clean up a mess the voter did not make. Dharapuram will vote tomorrow, and the result will be read as a verdict on Vijay's minority government. Fair enough. But whatever the outcome, the deeper verdict is already in: a politics that treats elections as renewable options for the ambitious, and voters as an audience to be recalled at will, has contempt for democracy itself. The people deserve representatives who serve their term — not tenants who vacate the mandate at the first better offer.