Union Home Minister Amit Shah recently sounded bullish about the BJP making inroads in Tamil Nadu. He wanted the State to elect more than 25 MPs in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
The strain in the AIADMK - BJP alliance became prominent when the late AIADMK supremo and former Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa, had distanced herself from the BJP after a humbling defeat in the 2004 Parliamentary elections.
But her death in 2016 sent the AIADMK into a crisis of leadership that threatened to split the Dravidian party into two, before a compromise was reached. During that period of intra-party chaos, the AIADMK realised that it had to have good relations with the BJP to stay afloat.
The party allied with the BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections and the 2021 Assembly polls, but suffered defeats in both. Initially, it didn’t really affect the relations between the two.
But, when former IPS officer K. Annamalai was appointed as the BJP state president in July 2021, the strain in the relations between the allies slowly began to emerge. Annamalai adopted an aggressive approach in pushing the BJP as the main opposition party in Tamil Nadu, as opposed to the Edappadi Palaniswami-led AIADMK.
With less than a year to go for the Lok Sabha elections, what should the both parties be mindful of? Should Edappadi Palaniswami and Annamalai work in tandem to strengthen the National Democratic Alliance in Tamil Nadu?
Script and presentation: D. Suresh Kumar
Production: Shibu Narayan
Videography: S. Shiva Raj
