Last day of campaigning: Vijay's Coimbatore-to-Dharapuram dash, 2,000 cops, and the price of spectacle

On the final day of campaigning for Tamil Nadu's October 6 Assembly bypolls, Chief Minister and TVK chief C. Joseph Vijay travels from Coimbatore to Dharapuram on Sunday for one last push behind his party's candidate, P. Sathyabama — and the state is rolling out the security apparatus of a visiting head of state for a party roadshow. Vijay will arrive in Coimbatore before travelling to Dharapuram, where polling is scheduled for Tuesday alongside Madurantakam, with counting on October 9. According to police, around 2,000 personnel will be deployed along his route. Unlike the route leaders usually take from the airport — via Goldwins, Chinniampalayam and Neelambur to Avinashi Road — the Chief Minister's convoy will pass through Chitra, Kamarajapuram, Singanallur and Ondipudur before joining the bypass toward Dharapuram. Officials expect large crowds on the narrow stretches, particularly on a Sunday holiday, and say crowd management is the central challenge. The scale of the bandobust is itself the story. Two thousand police personnel, diverted from a Sunday's ordinary duties, to shepherd one man's campaign convoy through city neighbourhoods — for bypolls that the ruling party itself manufactured. The Madurantakam and Dharapuram vacancies exist only because AIADMK MLAs K. Maragatham Kumaravel and P. Sathyabama resigned their seats weeks after winning them in April, joined the TVK, and were promptly renominated — Sathyabama on the TVK's whistle symbol in Dharapuram, Kumaravel in Madurantakam. AIADMK general secretary Edappadi K. Palaniswami has called it horse-trading and betrayal of the voters' mandate. The campaign's optics have matched its origins. At Vijay's September 30 Dharapuram rally — a 54-acre venue at Maruthi Nagar-Kondarasampalayam with QR-code entry passes, LED screens and a stage mounted on a bus — the Chief Minister asked voters to regard him as their son and a member of their family, while attacking the DMK and AIADMK as alike and stressing his government's opposition to corruption. On Friday, his 45-km Madurantakam roadshow from Mamandur saw multiple cars collide in the convoy, and the Chief Minister travelled in an open vehicle, stopped at a tea shop and drove a tractor for the cameras. Entry to the Madurantakam event was restricted to 5,000 people with QR-code passes — and passes were denied outright to pregnant women, children, school students, senior citizens, persons with disabilities and the unwell. A campaign that speaks of the common people, staged behind a QR code that the most vulnerable cannot scan. The DMK, meanwhile, has thrown its senior leadership into the fight: M.K. Stalin campaigned in Dharapuram and Madurantakam, with Leader of Opposition Udhayanidhi Stalin and Kanimozhi Karunanidhi also on the trail for the party's candidates. Forty-nine candidates remain in the fray across the two seats. Campaigning ends on Sunday. On Tuesday, voters in two constituencies will deliver a verdict not just on two candidates, but on whether a manufactured bypoll — and the full weight of the state machinery behind it — can purchase what the April mandate refused to give.