L. Santhanam is an Indian politician and was a

Member of the Legislative Assembly A member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) is a representative elected by the voters of a constituency to a legislative assembly. Most often, the term refers to a subnational assembly such as that of a state, province, or territory of a country. S ...

(MLA) of

Tamil Nadu Tamil Nadu (; , TN) is a States and union territories of India, state in southern India. It is the List of states and union territories of India by area, tenth largest Indian state by area and the List of states and union territories of India ...

. He was elected to the

Tamil Nadu legislative assembly The Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly is the unicameral legislature of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. It has a strength of 234 members of whom are democratically elected using the First-past-the-post voting, First-past-the-post system. The pres ...

as a

Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (; DMK) is a political party based in the state of Tamil Nadu where it is currently the ruling party having a comfortable majority without coalition support and the union territory of Puducherry where it is curre ...

(DMK) candidate from Sholavandan constituency in the 1996 election and from the Usilampatti constituency in

2001 The September 11 attacks against the United States by Al-Qaeda, which Casualties of the September 11 attacks, killed 2,977 people and instigated the global war on terror, were a defining event of 2001. The United States led a Participants in ...

as a candidate of the

All India Forward Bloc The All India Forward Bloc ( AIFB) is a left-wing nationalist political party in India. It emerged as a faction within the Indian National Congress in 1939, led by Subhas Chandra Bose. The party re-established as an independent political party a ...

(AIFB). He stood again for the Sholavandan seat in the

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, this time as a candidate for the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, and lost to P. Moorthy of the DMK. AIADMK leader

Jayalalithaa Jayaram Jayalalithaa (24 February 1948 – 5 December 2016) was an Indian politician and actress who served as Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu for more than fourteen years over six terms between 1991 and 2016. From 9 February 1989 to 5 December 2 ...

allocated the Usilampatti constituency candidacy to Santhanam in the 2001 elections as part of an electoral pact with the AIFB. His 2006 candidacy for the AIADMK was a consequence of a dispute within the AIFB, a party with which he had been at odds since at least 2004 despite being its general secretary. He was the sole AIFB MLA in the 2001-2006 Assembly and he disagreed with the AIFB leadership's interest in abandoning their electoral pact with the AIADMK for the 2006 elections. Despite his attempts in the courts to prevent it, Santhanam was expelled from the AIFB by its new president, the actor-politician Karthik, and reached an individual agreement with the AIADMK to contest a seat in the election. He was initially allocated the Madurai Central constituency but this was changed as Jayalalithaa made numerous adjustments, in part as an attempt to appease local party workers in various areas across the state who had objected to her choice of seat allocations.

References

Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam politicians Living people Tamil Nadu MLAs 1996–2001 All India Forward Bloc politicians Tamil Nadu MLAs 2001–2006 All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam politicians Year of birth missing (living people) {{DMK-politician-stub