Puducherry [India], May 7 : Puducherry Chief Minister and All India NR Congress leader N Rangasamy on Thursday submitted his resignation as the Chief Minister of Puducherry to Lieutenant Governor K Kailashnathan at Lok Bhavan.
The development follows the Puducherry Assembly election results.
The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) retained power in Puducherry. NR Congress won 12 seats and BJP four in the 30-member Puducherry assembly. AIADMK won one seat.
DMK won five seats and Congress got one. TVK, which made a spectacular debut in Tamil Nadu, also opened its account, winning two seats.
Rangasamy got a total of 10024 votes and won the Thattanchavady assembly constituency on Monday, securing victory by a margin of 4,441 votes following the counting of votes in the union territory (UT).
N Rangasamy is a veteran political leader in Puducherry and has been serving as Chief Minister of the Union Territory since May 2021. He has held the Chief Minister's post on multiple occasions earlier, first from 2001 to 2008, and again from 2011 to 2016. In 2011, he founded the All India N.R. Congress after breaking away from the Indian National Congress.
His political journey spans several decades of shifting electoral trends in Puducherry. In the 1970s, leaders such as V. Pethaperumal of the Indian National Congress were influential, while the 1977 elections saw the rise of the Janata Party. During the 1980s and 1990s, parties like the Janata Dal played a role, and Rangasamy himself emerged as an Indian National Congress representative by 1991.
The political scene continued to evolve through the 1996, 2001, and 2006 elections. In 2011, AINRC's presence strengthened under leaders like Ashok Anand. Later, a 2019 by-election was won by K. Venkatesan of the DMK, before Rangasamy returned to power in 2021 under the AINRC banner, marking another shift in Puducherry's political landscape.