Electoral Expediency

The bitter break-up from September 2023 is past, the BJP and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) are coming together again in Tamil Nadu.

- Amarnath K. Menon

The imperative: to try and dislodge the DMK-led Secular Progressive Alliance in the 2026 assembly election. BJP leader and Union home minister Amit Shah's March 25 meeting with AIADMK general secretary Edappadi K. Palaniswami (EPS) laid the contours for the tie-up. The hope is the NDA will be able to do what it did in Andhra Pradesh when the BJP aligned with the Telugu Desam Party and swept the poll last summer.

The two sides, though, will have to get past the nastiness of the past one-and-a-half years. State BJP chief K. Annamalai's barbs about the late CM C.N. Annadurai, one of the founding fathers of the Dravidian movement, and his comments such as the AIADMK under EPS being a "betting agent party" will be hard to live down, so too the latter's comment about the saffron party being "waste luggage". But both sides know that it's a now-or-never situation with the DMK getting more entrenched by the day.

Signs of a possible rapprochement surfaced in recent weeks when Annamalai suddenly referred to Palaniswamy as "brother" in an interaction with the media. To a query on the BJP's stand on the AIADMK, he accused the media of twisting facts “contrary to what my brother Edappadi and I had actually said”.