CHENNAI: The Tamil Nadu Congress chief K V Thangkabalu may have come up trumps in the allocation of as many as 13 seats to his followers in the party's first list of 60 candidates for the comingassembly elections, but discontent brewed in the other factions owing allegiance to the party's senior dalit leader K Jayakumar and Union ministers P Chidambaram and G K Vasan on Thursday over the allocation of fewer seats to them.
Although the state youth congress has got a fairly good deal in seat distributions, it's sections belonging to the two ministerial camps were unhappy. Factional groups staged protests indulging in vandalism at Satyamoorthy Bhavan, the state party headquarters, and heckling Jayanthi Thagkabalu, wife of the TNCC chief, as she filed her nomination for the Mylapore constituency where the sitting MLA S Ve Shekher who joined the Congress recently and another aspirant, R Thiagarajan, a close supporter of Union minister P Chidambaram, have been denied tickets.
Dejected ticket aspirants and their supporters claimed that Thangkabalu had exploited his long association and friendship with AICC general secretary in-charge of Tamil Nadu, Ghulam Nabi Azad, as well as the absence of the state CLP leader Sudarshanam who died last year, to misguide the party high command on selection of winnable candidates. Thangkabalu, now in his second term as the state party chief, had also sparked fights between other factions, to neutralise them, they charged.
Miffed over the denial of a ticket to their nominee Chengai Chellappan, the Congress councillor from Thiru-vi-ka-nagar, his supporters went on the rampage at the state party headquarters on Thursday afternoon breaking glass panes and partitions on the ground and first floors.They shouted slogans condemning the selection of Dr C Natesan, Managing Director of Bharathiraja Hospitals, as the party candidate from Thiru-vi-ka-nagar constituency.
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