It will be busy days ahead for the candidates who lost the elections as most of the parties are gearing up for introspection and analyse the factors that paved way for the huge and embarrassing defeats in the district.
Party leaders like M. Subramanian, district secretary of Communist Party of India who was also the candidate in Tirupur North constituency, and P. Gopi, Congress candidate in Kangayam constituency and a former district president of Congress, tell that though some reasons were apparent, a detailed soul search is under way to scrutinise the reasons that resulted in their losses.
Party insiders in DMK feel that the election strategy partially failed to gauge the ‘mood’ of the electors and certain ‘external factors’ happened at the last minute which resulted in the loss of their party’s candidates.
On the analysis methodology planned, sources in most of the parties were telling of convening meetings to discuss what went wrong strategically that swung the votes in the favour of winners.
But people who analyse the trends in the election feel that the political parties at the district level seemingly lack expertise to dissect the results in a holistic manner to find out the actual reasons for the defeat.
“Many parties make the same mistake of analysing the losses by convening a meeting of their cadre. What is the point in doing such thing? They should concentrate on convening forums of people at the grass root level and try to understand their pulses on why they did not vote for a particular party,” said R. M. Senthil Kumar, a chartered accountant by profession who analyse the poll trends regularly.
Activists like N. Shanmugasundaram, who is the president of Nallur Consumer Welfare Association, were of the opinion that the parties who suffered should go to the voters like Arvind Khejriwal did in Delhi when his party did badly in Lok Sabha polls. “The leaders of major parties who stand chances of winning next time should start working to win hearts of the voters right from now,” observed the activists.
