Failure in TN: Annamalai faces dissent, senior leaders raise voice

Chennai:The BJP’s failure in garnering at least a single seat in Tamil Nadu notwithstanding Annamalai’s efforts has given way to dissent in the state party, targeting the state chief.

K Annamalai, the state president of the BJP, is reportedly under fire with senior party leader Kalyana Raman blaming the party’s failure in polls on the party chief, saying that Annamalai deceived the party’s national leadership over the party’s growth in the state, The News Minute reported.

Annamalai lost to Ganapathy Rajkumar of the DMK by a margin of 1.14 lakhs in Coimbatore.

Kalyana Raman is reported to have called Annamalai a ‘pathological liar’, expressing dissent against the party chief.

A day before this statement came, another senior BJP leader Tamilisai Soundarajan urged IT wings of both the BJP and Opposition parties not to tarnish senior party leaders.

Tamilisai accused the DMK’s IT wing of calling her ‘ parattai’ a derogatory word often used to discriminate people ‘based on class, caste and racialised concepts of ‘ideal hair.’

Meanwhile, Annamalai said that the BJP’s vote share had grown and claimed the party is moving in the right direction, adding the party would work twice hard to win the 2029 Lok Sabha polls.

However, Kalyana Raman claimed in a post on X that the party’s vote share has come down in 2024 compared to 2014 polls.

Back then, the saffron party went to polls on its own without allying with the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) as it has done this time.

“5.56% (BJP’s vote share in 2014) was by contesting 9 seats and 11.24% (BJP’s vote share in 2024) was by contesting 23 seats. In other words, on a pro-rata basis, BJP should have got about 14.25% to equalise its 2014 performance,” he was quoted a stating.

Where the party lost deposits in only two seats in 2014, now it has lost in 11 seats, he pointed out.

“Huge loss of face before common man and bad perception management and pathetic political misadventure,” he said.

Pointing at Annamalai’s performance in Coimbatore, he said that CP Radhakrishan who is governor of Jharkhand, lost the seat in 2014 by 43,000 votes while Annamalai was defeated by three times margin of it.

Accusing Annamalai of stopping the seniors like Pon Radhakrishnan and Tamilisai Soundararajan , he said that the BJP chief and his ‘war room thugs’ held all decision making powers.

Even as dissenting voices are rising against him, Annamali is asked to reach Delhi amid speculations that he will be given the position of Minister of State in the third term of the Modi regime.