V Vaithilingam was shy about being photographed at his old two-storey house on Tuesday, apologising with a politician’s half-smile because he was still in a white baniyan and veshti. Sunlight came cleanly through glass blocks set into the old roof, filling the house with a kind of patient brightness. Outside, the lane had the familiar intimacy of Puducherry’s old neighbourhoods, where politics is rarely more than a few doors away from domestic life.
Inside, ahead of a high-stakes election in Puducherry’s Thattanchavady constituency in which Congress veteran Vaithilingam is now in direct contest with Chief Minister N Rangasamy, the Opposition leader insisted that the Congress-DMK alliance was intact, that the rebels who refused to withdraw nominations had already faced action, and that the real story of this election lay elsewhere: in unemployment, in the failures of the BJP’s “double-engine” government, and in what he described as the remaking of nearby Auroville ashram into “a training centre for the RSS.”
“There is no confusion,” Vaithilingam said, once, then again, then a third time. The insistence was striking because confusion is precisely what has hung over the alliance. The Congress and DMK reached a seat-sharing deal only after prolonged negotiations, eventually settling on 16 seats for Congress and 14 for the DMK, with one seat each to be allotted by the DMK to the CPI and VCK. Yet, overlapping nominations and talk of “friendly fights” in several constituencies exposed strains within the coalition.
But Vaithilingam would have none of it. “Actually, we are jointly working together. No problem. Our alliance is winning,” he said. And when pressed about the extra nominations filed by Congress candidates who did not withdraw, he dismissed the matter as aberrational. He said they are “no longer in the party”.
That, too, is part of his political style. Vaithilingam, 75, was appointed president of the Puducherry Pradesh Congress Committee in June 2023, when the party high command turned to him amid low cadre morale and factional tensions after the 2021 poll defeat. The choice was widely read as a bet on seniority, loyalty and a non-controversial stature within an often quarrelsome unit. He is a two-time former Chief Minister, an eight-time legislator and Lok Sabha member, with nearly five decades in the party.
Chief Minister N Rangasamy, who heads the ruling All India N R Congress (AINRC), in a recent interview with The Indian Express, made the pragmatic case for his alliance with the BJP: that because Puducherry is a Union Territory, development depends on being aligned with the party in power at the Centre. He argued that the Lieutenant Governor’s (L-G) institutional powers make that alignment all but necessary. Vaithilingam rejects the premise.
“What is the use?” Vaithilingam said, referring to the promise of Centre-UT synergy. “Nothing has happened in the last five years.”
He was especially scathing about the workings of the L-G’s office. “If the file goes to the government, he (L-G) will raise questions. How will the government run?” he said, describing a system in which administrative friction has become routine rather than exceptional.
He said the so-called double-engine formula has delivered only a quieter form of paralysis. He returned, too, to Auroville – the international township on Puducherry’s edge that has become a site of political, ideological and administrative conflict. For Vaithilingam, the change there is not simply developmental or cultural. It is political.
“The entire atmosphere they try to change as a training centre for the RSS,” Vaithilingam said. The Congress, he said, had sent teams and committees to look into the changes at Auroville, and found them disturbing. He spoke of Auroville less as a standalone controversy than as part of a broader anxiety about the direction in which institutions in and around Puducherry were being pulled.
On the core electoral issue of unemployment, however, he was more blunt. “There remains unemployment. And insecurity,” he said, linking joblessness to drug use, educational anxiety and a wider sense of disorder. Welfare doles, he suggested, were no substitute for work.
If the DMK were to emerge with more seats than the Congress inside the alliance, would that not naturally strengthen its claim to the Chief Minister’s post? Vaithilingam brushed the question aside. “Why are you asking this hypothetical question?” he said.
For now, Vaithilingam prefers the older political method: deny the split, insist on the alliance, broaden the battle. There is no confusion, he says, only an election to win.