'He's Buying MLAs, Not Votes': Udhayanidhi Accuses TVK of Engineering Dharapuram Bypoll

The campaign for the Dharapuram by-election has turned into a full-blown assault on the ruling TVK's democratic credentials, with DMK leader Udhayanidhi Stalin accusing Chief Minister C. Joseph Vijay of engineering the contest through poached defections. "Instead of buying votes, he's buying MLAs," Udhayanidhi told a rally in Dharapuram on Saturday, alleging that Vijay engineered the AIADMK split and lured legislators with promises. The charge was echoed on Sunday by AMMK general secretary TTV Dhinakaran, who called a TVK government "a curse for Tamil Nadu" and said "the Chief Minister is responsible for this by-election," alleging Vijay had secured the support of some 25 AIADMK MLAs through promises. The sequence of events behind the bypoll is undisputed. P. Sathyabama won the Dharapuram seat — a Scheduled Caste-reserved constituency in Tiruppur district — on an AIADMK ticket in the April 23 Assembly elections. Less than three weeks after entering the Assembly, she resigned on May 25, joined the TVK, and is now contesting the very seat she vacated as the ruling party's candidate. Polling is on October 6, with counting on October 9. That sequence is the opposition's strongest ammunition: voters' mandates treated as tradable assets, with the state's resources mobilised for a by-election manufactured by the ruling party itself. The TVK has not publicly responded to the specific allegations. The tension around the bypoll is palpable. On October 4, AIADMK cadres staged a sit-in outside the Dharapuram police station protesting the detention of their rural district secretary Selvakumar. Campaigning ended on Sunday, October 5. For a government that came to power promising a cleaner politics, the Dharapuram episode is an uncomfortable question: a mandate won on one party's symbol, bartered within weeks, and repackaged as a fresh democratic verdict.