TTV Dhinakaran, rebel AIADMK leader and nephew of jailed leader VK Sasikala, has done it – wrested the legacy of Amma from whom he described as ‘traitors – EPS-OPS combine” by scoring an emphatic 40,000 vote victory over the ruling party candidate E Madhusudhanan.

What his victory against all odds has done is to plant him firmly as a political leader in his own right and one with whom others will have to do business when it comes to 2019 general elections to Lok Sabha. With 40 seats (with Puducherry) Tamil Nadu becomes very important state for the two national parties, the Congress and the BJP.

While the BJP was looking to tie up with AIADMK – whose government it is believed to have propped up — or with the DMK that was positioning itself as the next government, Dhinakaran has disrupted the political script by his stupendous single-handed victory.

“I am the real successor of Amma,” declared Dhinakaran after winning the elections. “RK Nagar poll leads reflects the whole TN peoples’ minds,” he said indicating that he has already planned it all out. His line of argument, “People want me to succeed Amma,” has found resonance with the voters of RK Nagar, where he won a little over half of all the votes polled.

“Symbol is not important, the candidate is,” Dhinakaran said while one of his supporters said “we don’t want the two-leaves symbol, Anna will win on any symbol. The name of Anna (Dhinakaran) is enough said the supporter waving a poster of Dhinakaran.

The immediate repercussion of the Dhinakaran victory will be on the longevity of the EPS-OPS government. “The government will fall in three months,” a confident Dhinakaran declared minutes after he had secured an unassailable lead in the RK Nagar vote counting.

Many MLAs, “sleeping cells” will ditch the EPS-OPS camp for sure. Already the first to visit Dhinakaran was the Vellore MLA. A state minister began speaking that the two factions of the AIADMK should merge, indicating that the MLAs would be not averse to dumping the duo at the helm of affairs of the party now.

For the record, Dinakaran got 89,013 votes as against Madhusudhanan’s 48,306 votes. The DMKs’ N.Marudhu Ganesh came a poor third securing 24,681 votes. BJP secured less votes than NOTA.

Dhinakaran showed that anyone wanting to do business in Tamil Nadu must talk to him as he notched up over 50 per cent vote share. Perhaps the people were angry with EPS-OPS as they saw in them stooges of BJP whose stance on several issues of TN was not acceptable. NEET for one.

It was clear that Dhinakaran was seen as the wronged person, what with a plethora of cases against him, and voters had made up mind to vote for him.

But, clearly there was lot of money that flowed in RK Nagar.

“It is bad news for AIADMK but the worst news for the DMK” was the consensus among political analysts who said DMK that was thinking itself to be the government in waiting and losing deposit in a byelection was a terrible thing to happen.

DMK spokesperson TKS Elangovan said that the party will have to introspect to find out the reasons for the drubbing it got. The DMK could not retain the 50,000 votes it got in the 2016 general elections and could not even save its deposit.

The TN BJP state unit chief Tamilisai Soundararajan questioned what Dhinakaran did to deserve the victory he achieved. “We have been complaining for a long time that money was flowing in RK Nagar,” she said describing it as a victory of money.