Old alliance, new context
BJP and AIADMK get closer to reviving their alliance in Tamil Nadu. But the political ground has shifted
There is a churn underway in Tamil Nadu politics. Earlier this week, former chief minister (CM) and leader of the main opposition party in the state, Edappadi K Palaniswami (EPS) of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, met Union home minister and senior BJP leader Amit Shah in Delhi. On Wednesday, EPS confirmed that a revival of the BJP and AIADMK alliance was in the works — it had collapsed after the 2021 assembly elections. The AIADMK leader also said that a formal alliance is likely close to the state election scheduled to be held next year.
Arithmetic suggests that a National Democratic Alliance grouping in Tamil Nadu that includes the AIADMK can be a formidable force. In the 2021 assembly election, the NDA, which included the AIADMK, BJP, and PMK among others, ran the DMK-led Secular Progressive Alliance close by clocking 33.29% of the votes polled against the latter’s 37.70%. That the AIADMK was facing two terms of anti-incumbency, had lost its charismatic leader and multiple-times CM, J Jayalalithaa, and even suffered a split in the party made its electoral performance significant. Three years later, the DMK-led INDIA bloc swept the general election by winning all 39 seats in a multipolar contest that saw the AIADMK and the BJP lead separate coalitions. However, the two anti-DMK coalitions together polled 41.33% votes (the AIADMK front received 23.05% of the votes polled and the NDA had 18.28% vote share) compared to INDIA bloc’s 47%. Electoral math is influenced by many factors, including the chemistry among allies, leaders, and the narratives in play — but these numbers hold out a clear promise.
To be sure, political calculations in Tamil Nadu in the coming days will be a complicated affair because of a new entrant, actor Vijay, whose star power is a big draw among young voters and a section of the minorities. He has pitched himself in the Dravidian political spectrum by invoking Periyar EV Ramaswamy’s legacy and upholding Tamil subnationalism while criticising both the DMK and the AIADMK as well as the BJP. The arrival of a new, if untested, political voice projecting itself as an alternative to the DMK will be a challenge for the AIADMK-BJP alliance since it can split the Opposition vote: However, the Vijay factor may also work against the DMK alliance since the film star is competing for the same ideological space.
Even if the alliance were to be revived ahead of next year’s election — the if arises from the looming presence of state BJP chief K Annamalai, who has made his feelings about the AIADMK clear, just as the latter’s leaders, including EPS, have made theirs of him — the NDA will need a powerful narrative to counter the DMK’s substantial social coalition that includes the Congress, the premier Dalit group VCK, and the two communist parties. The DMK has also used the controversy over the three-language formula in the National Education Policy and delimitation to build an ideological argument that projects the party as the sole custodian of Tamil interests. It will be interesting to see how the AIADMK and the BJP work around this.