The Tamil Nadu ruling ADMK party and the opposition party DMK have been preparing for the race within its respective alliance to choose the successors for the six Rajya Sabha MPs of Tamil Nadu as these seats will become vacant in April. 

On Tuesday, the Election Commission of India has announced the schedule for the elections to 55 Rajya Sabha seats in 17 states that are due to get expired in April and as per the schedule, the polls to fill these in the upper house of the Parliament will be held on March 26. 

Of those 55 seats, Tamil Nadu accounts for six seats. These six seats have currently been occupied by S Muthukaruppan, Vijila Satyanath, Selvaraj of ADMK, Sasikala Pushpa - the rebelled ADMK member who joined BJP, TK Rangarajan of CPM, and Trichy Siva of DMK parties. The reports say that filing the nominations for these six seats would begin on March 6th and conclude on March 13th after which the filed nominations will be scrutinized and the final list of candidates would be released on March 16 and the final date of withdrawing the nominations is March 18.

As far as voting is concerned, a Rajya Sabha MP from Tamil Nadu would be elected through the votes of legislative MLAs and an MP candidate needs the votes of 34 MLAs to win a Rajya Sabha seat of Tamil Nadu and with the current numbers of the MLAs in the assembly, the ADMK and DMK party can easily elect three MPs each without any election. The ADMK party has 125 MLAs while DMK and its alliance have 109 MLAs. 

At the current trend, the four MPs of ADMK are going to get retired. However, with the prevailing strength, the ADMK can only send three MPs while DMK, in place of one MP, has now gained the support to send three MPs to the Rajya Sabha. Although it's less likely to have elections, the top parties ought to encounter the politics from the respective alliance as the allied parties would pressure the Dravidian parties to grant them a ticket to Rajya Sabha.

The ADMK party has been strongly criticized for backing the CAA law in Rajya Sabha and it has BJP and PMK in its alliance while DMK has Congress, Indian Union Muslim League, VCK, and Communists in its coalition. Currently, the ADMK and its alliance have 11 Rajya Sabha MPs, of which four MPs are due to retire in April and the DMK led coalition has seven MPs in the upper house, of which the seats of two MPs are becoming vacant.