Belying poll predictions of a close fight, DMK, apparently capitalising on division of votes in a three-cornered contest forced by the actor-politician Vijaykant's DMDK, romped home in 18 of the 21 seats it contested, helping its ally Congress to win eight seats and VCK one.
     
AIADMK's rainbow alliance did not cut much ice with the people despite Jayalalithaa's attempts to make the emotive Sri Lankan Tamils issue a major poll plank as it managed to win only 12 seats with her pro-LTTE MDMK and PMK allies suffering the most. The Left parties, which formed part of the alliance, had to be content with CPI-M and CPI winning one each.
    
The backward class Vanniyar-backed PMK, which dumped the UPA ahead of the polls, fell by the wayside failing to win even a single seat out of the seven it contested while MDMK managed to win a seat but its firebrand leader Vaiko himself was trounced in Virudhunagar.
     
However, the Congress could not do as well as its regional ally the DMK, as only eight of its 15 nominees made it to Lok Sabha with Union Ministers Manishankar Aiyar and E V K S Elangovan biting the dust while Home Minister P Chidambaram scraped through in a see-saw battle by a slender margin of 3,354 votes.Chidambaram's AIADMK rival Raja Kannapan demanded a recount and threatened to legally challenge the verdict.

Despite his ill-health, the octogenarian DMK leader, M Karunanidhi, led the UPA to a spectacular victory from his hospital bed. Though the combine could not repeat its 2004 performance when it swept all 39 seats, it captured more than two thirds of the seats. DMK itself improved its tally by two seats over the 2004 polls.
    
Karunanidhi described his party's victory as a reward for his government's hard work but Jayalalithaa dismissed it as a win for money and muscle power.
    
The defeat of some of the senior Congress leaders like Aiyar, Elangovan and TNCC president K V Thangkabalu was seen as a fallout of the high-voltage campaign by a section of the film industry and pro-Eelam groups against the party nominees.
    
Like in the 2006 assembly polls, Vijaykant's DMDK played spoil sport by cutting into the vote share of AIADMK in most constituencies, enabling DMK to win with good margins.

BJP contested 12 seats and BSP 15 but both drew a blank. While the AIADMK demonstrated its supremacy in the western districts where it picked up most of its seats, DMK has done well in others areas.
    
DMK made a dent into the AIADMK stronghold of southern districts, where it won nine of the ten seats, including Madurai where Karunanidhi's son M K Azhagiri made a debut by winning the seat by a margin of about 1.40 lakh votes.

It also demolished the PMK in the Vanniyar heartland of northern districts. DMK lost only two seats -- Tiruvallur and Villupuram -- in the region.