On October 6, Tuesday, voters in Madurantakam and Dharapuram in Tamil Nadu will be asked to do something they were not expecting to do again so soon. Five months after electing their representatives, they are being asked to cast their vote again.K. Maragatham Kumaravel and P. Sathyabama contested the April 23 assembly election in the state as All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) candidates, and they won Madurantakam and Dharapuram constituencies, respectively. Kumaravel defeated the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) candidate by 7,194 votes in Madurantakam, while Sathyabama defeated the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) candidate by 16,727 votes in Dharapuram.Within weeks, however, both MLAs resigned, leaving the AIADMK and joining TVK. Actor-turned-politician C. Joseph Vijay’s TVK had pulled off a surprise victory in the Assembly elections this year, winning 108 seats. While that left it 10 seats short of the 118 needed for a simple majority in the 234-member Assembly, it was still a major win for a very new party in a state like Tamil Nadu.TVK has now put them back in the same constituencies as its candidates.Observers say this makes the by-elections different from an ordinary contest for a vacant seat. The vacancies were the direct consequence of the post-election political rearrangement that brought actor Vijay to power. The two AIADMK MLAs were among those who crossed over to the new ruling party, sparking allegations of horse-trading, of money and promises of power being involved.The campaign has consequently revolved around the circumstances that created the election. For the AIADMK, this is explicitly a fight over its mandate. Edappadi K. Palaniswami has repeatedly argued that the voters elected the two MLAs as AIADMK representatives, not as TVK politicians. At a Dharapuram rally, he put the question bluntly: “Who voted for her? It was the people who voted for her.” He accused Vijay of taking an elected AIADMK representative into his party and said, “Vijay has stolen our MLA.”Palaniswami has taken the argument further, accusing TVK of using defections to protect its government. Launching his Madurantakam campaign, he said he had come seeking “justice to the betrayal he faced” and accused TVK of “dirty horse-trading”.The AIADMK has now fielded S. Kanitha Sampath in Madurantakam and K. Bhanumathi in Dharapuram. Its campaign is not merely about defeating the TVK candidates. It is an attempt to establish that the two-leaves vote belongs to the organisation and its symbol rather than to individual MLAs who changed parties.TVK, meanwhile, has chosen to embrace rather than obscure the defections. It has renominated both Kumaravel and Sathyabama.Vijay has campaigned personally in both constituencies. His campaign has combined attacks on the DMK and AIADMK with a highly personalised style of political outreach. In Madurantakam, he travelled through more than 30 villages in a 45-kilometre roadshow, stopped at a roadside tea shop and drove a tractor.Given the fact that Vijay had not campaigned this extensively even during the general elections, the opposition has interpreted the campaign as a sign of anxiety.At a Madurantakam campaign meeting on Saturday, former chief minister and DMK chief M.K. Stalin took aim at Vijay’s roadshow, saying: “You are going to tea shops and fields only now because of the fear of defeat.” He also questioned why a chief minister was spending so much time campaigning in a by-election and said October 6 should be “the day that ends arrogance and betrayal.”A new show of strengthThe TVK-led alliance has also used the bypolls to publicly display the new political alignment. Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK) chief Thol Thirumavalavan, Congress state president Manickam Tagore, Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK) general secretary Vaiko and Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) representatives campaigned alongside TVK leaders in Madurantakam. The symbolism is difficult to miss. In April, these parties were campaigning with the DMK. Now they are all seeking votes for the former AIADMK MLAs who crossed over to TVK.The DMK is fighting a considerably altered battle from the one it fought in April. Its candidates are I. Paranthamen in Madurantakam and S Suganya in Dharapuram. The party finished third in Madurantakam and second in Dharapuram in the April elections.However, the campaign is not simply about the two constituencies. Stalin has attempted to turn the bypoll into a judgement on the new government and on the manner in which it came to power. At Dharapuram, he questioned Vijay’s silence on the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls and asked: “Are you afraid of the BJP so much?” At Madurantakam, he returned to the question of defections, accusing the TVK government of being built through political crossovers. He also attacked the government’s claims of being a “pure force”, contrasting that rhetoric with what he described as a government protecting former ministers facing corruption cases.Referring to Sathyabama breaking down over the “abuse she had received for switching parties” and Vijay consoling her, Palaniswami accused TVK of staging a drama to generate sympathy, saying it was “more dramatic than cinema”. Vijay, for his part, has sharpened his attack on both Dravidian parties. He accused Palaniswami of collaborating with the DMK, and invoked the legacy of MGR and Jayalalithaa, arguing that the AIADMK leader was betraying their political inheritance.The Left’s support from outsideThe Communist Party of India (CPI) and CPI(Marxist)’s decision to contest separately is perhaps the most interesting political distinction in these bypolls. Both parties continue to support the TVK government from outside. Yet the CPI is contesting Dharapuram and the CPI(M) Madurantakam against TVK.The Left has been explicit that it does not consider itself part of the TVK alliance. CPI state secretary M. Veerapandian said that since the Assembly election, the Left had not been part of any alliance and had decided, after discussions with party workers, to contest independently. The reason for the apparent contradiction lies in the distinction the parties make between supporting a government and supporting it electorally.The Left’s support for the TVK government was intended to prevent what it described as the advance of “fascist forces”, and to keep the BJP out of power. The support is issue-based rather than an alliance with TVK. Left leaders say the distinction is important because the Left does not want its support for the government to be read as an endorsement of TVK’s political programme.In fact, the Left has made the defections that created these by polls one of its principal campaign issues. CPI(M) state secretary P. Shanmugam asked: “What’s the guarantee they wouldn’t resign again and join another party if elected?” He described the defections as a “betrayal of voters” and said this would be the Left’s primary campaign issue.So the Left’s position is internally consistent in one particular sense: it can support the continuation of the government while opposing the manner in which the government acquired its numbers and opposing the TVK candidates in these constituencies.The Left has also alleged that money is being distributed to voters. Shanmugam said villagers had told party campaigners that all the parties were distributing cash and alleged that TVK was offering the highest amount. “While other parties are giving money for votes, the CPI(M) is only giving pamphlets,” he quoted voters as telling him. TVK has denied the allegation.The result is a five-cornered contest in which every party is asking voters to answer a different question. For TVK, it is about whether the party can convert Vijay’s highly personalised following into an electoral mandate beyond the Assembly election. For the AIADMK, it is about survival: it cannot afford to lose seats it won barely five months ago, particularly to a party that has taken its elected representatives and is now seeking to retain those seats under a different symbol. For the DMK, it is about fighting back after its April defeat and establishing itself as the principal challenger to the new TVK government.There is, however, another contest running underneath the five-cornered battle: Vijay’s attempt to position TVK as the political successor to the AIADMK, particularly its MGR-Jayalalithaa legacy and its anti-DMK space. Vijay has repeatedly framed the principal electoral contest as one between TVK and the DMK, placing the AIADMK among the “others”. In the bypoll campaign, he has gone further, invoking MGR and Jayalalithaa while arguing that the present AIADMK leadership has compromised their political legacy by considering an alliance with the DMK. Palaniswami has pushed back sharply, arguing that Vijay has no claim to the AIADMK’s political inheritance and reminding voters of the actor’s earlier association with the party leadership. So the bypolls also test whether Vijay can persuade AIADMK voters that TVK, rather than the party founded by MGR, is now the principal political alternative to the DMK.For the Left, the question is different again: whether it can support the continuation of a government while retaining an independent political and electoral identity. When casting their votes on Tuesday, the voters of Madurantakam and Dharapuram will not be merely reopening the contests of April. They will record the first electoral response to Tamil Nadu’s new political map. And that makes the by-elections much more important.