Alliance in place, Amit Shah sets ambitious target for NDA in Tamil Nadu

At a rally of BJP workers, Amit Shah said the party should aim at winning 35 Lok Sabha seats for the ruling alliance in the upcoming parliamentary polls.

BJP president Amit Shah on Friday set an ambitious target to win more than 35 seats for the ruling alliance in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls in Tamil Nadu, where the Bharatiya Janata Party and the All India Anna Dravda Munnetra Kazhagam have joined hands for the parliamentary elections.

BJP president Amit Shah addressing party’s Shakti Kendra Pramukh Sammelan at Ramanathapuram in Tamil Nadu on Friday.(Photo: Twitter/@BJP4India)

“I am sure we will win more than 35 seats in Tamil Nadu in the upcoming elections,” said Shah while addressing a rally of booth-level BJP workers in Tamil Nadu’s Ramanathapuram. The BJP is in alliance with the AIADMK and the PMK for the Lok Sabha polls.

The BJP is contesting five Lok Sabha seats as part of the alliance – four in Tamil Nadu and one in Puducherry. The AIADMK, the senior alliance partner in the state, is likely to contest 28 Lok Sabha seats. The third constituent PMK has been given seven Lok Sabha seats to contest in the upcoming general elections.

Shah asked the BJP workers to work for the alliance on all 40 Lok Sabha seats. “We are not only contesting five seats. We are contesting all 40 Lok Sabha seats. Whether the candidates are contesting on the tickets of AIADMK or the PMK, they all are contesting the polls to make Narendra Modi the prime minister in 2019,” the BJP president said at the Shakti Kendra Pramukh Sammelan.

Shah targeted the opposition alliance of the Congress and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam saying they “stand for corruption” and can do “no good” to the state or the country. He alleged that scams worth Rs 12 lakh crore were engineered by the Congress and the DMK when they were in power.

Stating that Prime Minister Narendra Modi “is a hardworking leader who works for 18 out of 24 hours a day”, Shah said the electing him as the prime minister again is a “necessity” for the country “not only for the BJP”.

The BJP had won one Lok Sabha seats in Tamil Nadu in 2014 parliamentary elections. Its alliance partner, the PMK had won the other seat for the NDA five years ago. The AIADMK, then led by Late Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa, had swept the last Lok Sabha polls winning 37 of 39 seats in the state. The DMK and the Congress had failed to win a single seat.

In 2019, the DMK and Congress announced their seat sharing arrangement in Tamil Nadu and neighbouring Puduchery earlier this week. The Congress will contest 10 Lok Sabha seats including the lone Puducherry seat.

It is not yet clear how many seats the DMK will contest in the Lok Sabha polls. The party is in talks with the CPI, the CPI(M), the MDMK of Vaiko and the Indian Muslim League. The DMK, however, is expected to contest 25 to 28 seats.