Star Candidate: Dayanidhi Maran / DMK

CHENNAI: Coming with a powerful surname, 58-year-old sitting Chennai Central MP Dayanidhi Maran is running for the fourth term from the constituency. Dayanidhi has the inherent advantage of contesting from one of the Lok Sabha constituencies widely believed to be a bastion of the DMK.

Political heir of his veteran Parliamentarian father late ‘Murasoli’ Maran, Dayanidhi went on to become the Union minister of Information Technology in his very first stint as MP in 2004, a year after his father’s demise in 2003. Dayanidhi served as the union IT minister for the first half of the UPA-I tenure before relinquishing the portfolio to his party colleague A Raja.

Representing the 13 lakh odd voters of the constituency, Maran served as Union textile minister in the second, completing full tenure of the UPA-II. During this stint, the clarity in his articulation and conviction in political beliefs, and not to mention the sharp business acumen earned many friends in Lutyens Delhi. Lacking the rhetorical flourish of most of his party men was never a deterrent to the Economics graduate from Loyola, who connected with the largely subaltern voters and a small section of elites in Anna Nagar with ease.

Apart from winning from the seat multiple times, Dayanidhi’s father ‘Murasoli’ Maran too represented it. This obviously would qualify him for the label ‘son of the soil’ for the Chennai Central constituency.

The blue eyed boy of the DMK would now have to walk the extra mile to outdo his three lakh and odd victory margin of 2019 if he were to prove his critics wrong on the incumbent front.