Home minister Amit Shah on Friday announced a tie-up between the BJP and the AIADMK for the Assembly polls in Tamil Nadu next year, reviving the alliance with the Dravidian party in a bid to spread wings in the southern state and take on incumbent DMK.
Shah made the announcement at a media address in Chennai, flanked by AIADMK leader Edappadi K. Palaniswami, the leader of the Opposition in the Assembly, and outgoing state BJP chief K. Annamalai.
“The party leaders have decided that the AIADMK, BJP and all the alliance parties will contest next year’s Assembly polls together as the NDA,” Shah said.
The AIADMK has three MPs in the Lok Sabha, who will now be part of the ruling NDA, Shah said. The BJP, which is short of majority in the Lower House, banks on the support of NDA allies.
“At the national level, the alliance will be led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and at the state level, it will be led by Edappadi,” Shah said, stressing that Palaniswami would be the NDA's chief ministerial face.
Shah recalled the political association between Modi and the late Jayalalithaa, former chief minister and AIADMK leader, to assert that the relationship between the two parties was “permanent”.
The AIADMK had snapped ties with the BJP ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, terming the saffron party a liability. The two parties had contested the 2019 Lok Sabha elections and the 2021 Assembly polls together, but the alliance failed to make any mark as the DMK swept both the polls.
The AIADMK has been struggling since Jayalalithaa's death in 2016, and the renewal of ties with the BJP is seen to be driven by the compulsion to use the help of the resource-rich saffron party to take on the ruling DMK in the Assembly polls.
The BJP, on the other hand, is eyeing the support of the Dravidian party to get a stronger foothold in the key southern state, which has remained out of bounds despite the party’s national dominance for over a decade now.
The BJP also hopes to use the AIADMK’s support to take on the ruling DMK, which has emerged as an aggressive Opposition nationally, sharpening the north-south divide by taking on the Modi government’s alleged Hindi bias in the new education policy and the delimitation of constituencies, which it claims would reduce the Lok Sabha seats of all southern states.
Shah dismissed questions on whether the M.K. Stalin-led government was raking up issues such as Sanatan Dharma, the three-language policy and delimitation to shift focus from the corruption charges. He exuded confidence that the NDA would get a solid mandate and form a government.
The AIADMK's return to the NDA fold coincides with the easing out of Annamalai. Annamalai, an IPS officer-turned-politician known for his frequent run-ins with the AIADMK leadership, was seen as a key reason behind the breakdown of the alliance in 2023.
The electoral tie-up announcement was made after BJP MLA Nainar Rajendran filed his nomination papers for the state party chief's post and is set to be elected unopposed on Saturday. Rajendran, a former AIADMK leader, appears to have been chosen for the post to ensure better coordination between the alliance partners.
Shah, however, denied that Annamalai had been removed to please the AIADMK. In a post on X, he heaped praise on Annamalai and said he would be given a prominent position at the national level.
“As the president of the Tamil Nadu BJP unit, Annamalai has made commendable accomplishments…. The BJP will leverage Annamalai’s organisational skills in the party's national framework,” he said.