BJP conceding AIADMK demands in 

eagerness for poll alliance?

N Sathiya Moorthy 

27 March 2025

EPS has had its way on most things, alliance-wise. A week earlier, he reiterated that he would not re-admit OPS and Sasikala Natarajan back in the party. It was a message not just to detractors in the AIADMK. It was even more so for the BJP leadership in Delhi. Even more important for the AIADMK was their demand for prospective allies accepting EPS as the chief ministerial candidate of any alliance that the party would form, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.

Even those who had hoped for the revival of the AIADMK-BJP alliance for the Tamil Nadu assembly polls did not expect the early signs to appear so early in the day.

The Tuesday, March 25, 2025 meeting between Union Home Minister and BJP strategist Amit Shah and AIADMK boss and former chief minister Edappadi K Palaniswami (EPS) has already set the ball rolling, and tongues wagging.

Together, the meeting in which EPS made sure to have his key lieutenants and kept out rebels, real and imaginary, means that a BJP-AIADMK alliance has put the ruling DMK and the DMK-Congress INDIA combine on notice.

Shah also set the tone and tenor of their campaign-platfor, when he posted his Rajya Sabha response to AIADMK interlocutor and former Lok Sabha deputy speaker Thambidurai, on his social media platform.

Shah said that the illicit liquor and corruption in Tamil Nadu would come to an end when the NDA came to power in 2026.

If he meant that there is already an agreement for a coalition government if they won, he did not mention it.  

Yet, it was becoming increasingly clear that EPS has had its way on most things, alliance-wise.

A week earlier, he went bold to reiterate that he would not re-admit estranged three-time chief minister OPS and his one-time benefactor and Jayalalithaa’s confidante Sasikala Natarajan back in the party.

It was a message not just to detractors in the party who were clamouring for strengthening the party through such re-admittance, including that of another faction under former MP/MLA, T T V Dhinakaran.

It was even more so for the BJP leadership at Delhi. The Delhi meeting with Amit Shah thus seems to be confirmation that EPS has had his way on this count.

Even more important for the AIADMK as a party and EPS as the leader was their demand for accepting him as the chief ministerial candidate of any alliance that the party would form, or join in.

Again, the Delhi meeting is said to be proof thereof.

As may be recalled, the alliance from two past elections in 2019 and 2021 floundered after state BJP chief K Annamalai began targeting EPS, and the AIADMK in turn decided not to have anything to do with his leadership.

It’s also a fact that the BJP was ready to risk the alliance, if only to test its own strength as the leader of an NDA without any strong ally like the AIADMK, in the Lok Sabha polls of 2024.

Together in 2019, and separately five years later, the two parties learnt that the rival DMK alliance was too big to trounce on their individual steam.

An alliance for 2026 made sense, and needed to be made plausible early on, if only to repair the grassroots-level ruptures that had shown up in the interim.

Yet, EPS too has to do some compromise. By available accounts, the BJP leadership has refused to meet his demand for replacing Annamalai as the state unit chief.

Rather, it used to be customary for national allies, particularly, the Congress and/or BJP in the past to signal their shifting of gears by changing the TN unit boss when they decide to cross over from the AIADMK to the DMK or vice versa.

That was also because having been told to fire against the existing ally on all cylinders, whether to snap existing ties, or only to send out a message, the incumbent often would go overboard, to impress those in Delhi.

Over time, the local bosses of these parties understood that they were only pawns in a game that they were not fully aware of until it became too late for them.

A raw hand to politics (he was earlier an IPS officer in neighbouring Karnataka), Annamalai did not understand the nuances.

Nor was he in a mood to take advice from more experienced party leaders in the state.

However, to Annamalai’s credit, it should be said that the BJP high command has ensured that EPS and the AIADMK accepted him as their alliance leader in the state, even if not as chief minister.

Plain and simple, Shah & Co was sending out a message to EPS that the latter does not run the state BJP, too.

But that is only a face-saver for Annamalai, it seems. According to reports, the BJP high command may set up a separate committee comprising state party leaders other than Annamalai to coordinate election work with EPS & Co.

There is no firm word on it, and the suggestion/expectation flows from the high command setting up a similar committee to run the state party affairs when Annamalai was away for ‘political education’ in the UK, at the invitation of the host-government last year.

There are others in the state BJP who still hope that for better coordination with the AIADMK, Annamalai may be drafted to the nationalscene, possibly as a minister of state in Modi 3.0, in addition to his predecessor, Dr L Murugan, who was similarly accommodated.

Of course, there are two vibrant Tamil ministers at the Cabinet level, Dr S Jaishankar in external afairs and Nirmala Sitharaman, as the longest-serving finance minister of the country.

As has become her wont, Sitharaman, in this Budget session of Parliament, has begun taking on the ruling DMK rival in the state, as she had done in the long run-up to past elections in the state since she joined Modi 1.0.

Likewise, there is still speculation that the BJP may not desert their past friends from 2024, including the three breakaway AIADMK factions.

It is not unlikely that the BJP may retain them into the NDA and allot seats for one or more of those factions without the AIADMK having to re-admit them.

How functional such an arrangement can be is a question as the NDA will have to commence by counting out the seats allotted to these parties as ‘lost’ ones, if the AIADMK refuses to cooperate.

Such a proposition may encourage the BJP high command to try and dissuade them all from wanting to contest the 2026 poll on an NDA ticket.

However, the BJP’s distractors in the state say that EPS and Annamalai should worry about whatever Nirmala Sitharaman says inside Parliament or in her visits to the state, which is expected to become as frequent as on the eve of previous elections.

According to them, more there are in the rival camp, it would be merrier for the DMK leadership.

It is not as simple as they want to make one believe. There is definitely an anti-incumbency trend in the state though it cannot be said to have reached wave-like proportions.

How participant-actors play it out, between now and the elections, would decide if anti-incumbency could become a show-stealer or not.

The reasons are not far to seek. Independent of anti-incumbency, in any election in the state, it is the electoral arithmetic that has worked on the ground.

This means the ‘strongest alliance’ won, especially in the absence of a charismatic leader like AIADMK’s MGR or his political heir, Jayalalithaa.

Of course, the latter also single-handedly lost elections in 1996, 2004 and 2006, while in power.

A lot of the pre-poll calculations for 2026 will depend on the kind of alliance that Amit Shah is able to stitch — whether the NDA is going to keep it small and sweep, the BJP, AIADMK and (some of) their existing allies, who would be given the minimum number of seats.

Included in the list is the Vanniar-strong PMK with a proven five per cent vote-share, but they are not going to yield small time on seat-sharing, with hopes of a share in post-poll government.

The big question however is if actor-politician Vijay’s TVK would join this alliance, especially if he is promised the job of deputy chief minister.

Of course, such a course would involve state BJP leaders demanding one for the party, and the PMK, for instance, would not want to keep quiet, either.

A lot will depend on Vijay’s decision, which he cannot until he begins touring the state.

He is still busy with his swan song of a film, due for release only later this year.

There is no doubt that he has lost a lot of time, and strategic initiative by entering the scene, if at all, too late, in the day, the AIADMK and BJP having consolidated their posturing, if not official positions towards a poll alliance, a year ahead.

The same applies to another actor-politician Seeman’s NTK, which has been witnessing very many second-line leaders leaving the party — but not all of them are joining the TVK, as expected.

Many of them were waiting for clear political signals to emerge, and now they may begin evaluating their positions.

Where does it all leave the ruling DMK combine?

On paper, the alliance remains strong, particularly counting on the ‘women votes’ that had once belonged to the AIADMK under MGR and Jayalalithaa, but not possibly so, any more.

DMK strategists seem to have concluded that Chief Minister M K Stalin’s women-oriented welfare programmes like free bus travel, free breakfast for school children along with the existing free noon-meal scheme, and monthly monetary allowance of Rs 1,000, now also for college-going boys, will all see them through.

Though not intended to be an election issue, even if it were a diversionary tactic against anti-incumbency, the consolidation of the new-generation ‘pan-Tamil vote-bank’ in the state has now been ensured after talks of a BJP-AIADMK alliance.

Needless to point out, it was only the anti-Hindutva, anti-BJP youth sentiment of the time that caused the historical/apolitical ‘Jallikattu protests’ in January 2017, after decades of waning pan-Tamil electoral plank.

The DMK’s revival of issues like delimitation and ‘Hindi imposition’ has had a receptive constituency, infused as it was also by the AIADMK’s support for what was seen as the ‘larger Tamil cause’.

EPS submitting a memorandum on delimitation to Amit Shah at their Tuesday meeting was nearly ignored by the media, as they were already talking about a probable poll alliance and its possible fallouts.

However, the visible restlessness among the urban middle class cannot be ignored. They feel the economic pressures day in and day out, even otherwise.

To this, the Stalin government has added higher power-tariff, property tax and the like.

There is also a real concern about the declining law and order situation, though not to the levels that the DMK’s detractors want the new generation voters to believe that it is as much a legacy issue as ‘family rule’.

The claims are that such issues have not impacted on rural and semi-urban voters, both men and women.

The issue of corruption, however magnified, has never been a game-changer in the state, it is further argued.

Beyond political administration and anti-incumbency, the DMK leadership too will be saddled with demands for a post-poll coalition government and more seats, especially from allies like the Congress and VCK.

While state Congress leaders have been quiet about it outwardly until now, VCK leader Thol Thirumavalavan has been making all the noise for months.

The question is if the DMK would be ready to swap VCK’s place with that of the PMK, if the latter too is ready, as according to some assessments, Thiruma may have lost some of his increasingly decreasing vote-share to the BJP in its traditional northern strongholds (if they are any still) and possibly to Vijay’s TVK, elsewhere.

The other candidate, who is keeping her decisions to herself is the DMDK boss, Premalatha Vijayakanth, whose party’s vote-share may have shrunk, but would still be useful for ‘denying’ a rival alliance those votes.

NDA strategists in the state too would be interested in the DMDK, however limited their real use will be.

Of course, it is too early to draw conclusions, but as elections in the past have proved, stronger the alliance with identifiable vote-shares of individual partners, greater are the chances of electoral success.

As the late DMK patriarch M Karunanidhi told his anti-AIADMK, anti-Jaya allies during poll talks in 2004, ‘Either each of us demand as many seats as you want and all of us lose everything, or we downsize our ambitions in terms of each one’s share, but together we win all.’

Karunanidhi was proved right. Despite being in power in the state and at the Centre, the AIADMK-BJP combine lost all 40 seats, including the Union Territory of Puducherry that too by huge margins, and the DMK combine swept them all. There was a caveat.

Apart from the ‘alliance calculations’, there was also the unprecedented anti-Jaya, anti-incumbency factor, after she had sacked over a hundred thousand state government officials overnight, denied higher procurement prices for paddy farmers, and interfered with the religious beliefs of some of the communities that were traditional supporters of the party.

That she however remained a believer did not help.

Once again, the government employees and pensioners may hold the key to victory in Elections 2026, especially for the ruling DMK.

There are a total of 14 lakh government employees and six lakh pensioners in the state, and they are upset over the Stalin leadership not keeping its promise on pay-rise and perks, made in the DMK poll manifesto of 2021.

On an average of four votes per family, the total of 20 lakh government employees and pensioners account for around 80 lakh dependent-voters, who are equitably distributed across all 234 assembly constituencies, unlike caste and minority religious concentrations. 

That accounts for 13 per cent of the 6.18-crore electorate — and that is saying a lot in terms of the final outcome, especially if they were to vote en masse as in 2004, and the sympathetic employees of the central government and central PSUs, too, do so, as on that occasion. 

BJP Concedes AIADMK Demands In Eagerness For Alliance – Rediff.com India News

N Sathiya Moorthy, veteran journalist and author, is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator.