The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) may be engaged in a tough battle to retain Uttar Pradesh, but the first real good news for the party has come from Tamil Nadu, that seemingly impregnable fort for the ruling party at the Centre.
Laughed away and dismissed by many as the “north Indian Hindi party”, the BJP has shown with its performance in the just concluded local urban body elections that scoffing at it might not be a smart thing to do.
Senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi had a few days ago declared that the BJP could never enter Tamil Nadu and that its people would continue to reject it. But the BJP Tamil Nadu unit lost no time and proved him wrong in less than a week, winning 230 seats in the local body elections held across the state. The vote percentages are yet to be collated and tabulated, but BJP leaders expect it to cross the double digit mark.
The BJP clinched a total of 308 seats. It won 22 seats in municipal corporations, 56 in municipalities and 230 in town panchayats.
BJP Tamil Nadu state unit president K Annamalai claimed that in few places like Coimbatore and its neighbourhood, the BJP had secured nearly 15 per cent of the vote cast. Although these are early days for the BJP to replicate its West Bengal-like growth, the “shocking” performance of the BJP proves that it was right in testing its strength and fighting the local body polls alone.
After the DMK, which nearly swept the polls and the runners up AIADMK, the BJP has become the third largest party by winning 230 seats spread across the state, enabling it to gain a foothold in several virgin areas like Cuddalore, Vellore, Madurai and even Chennai, considered the DMK stronghold.
Definitely a morale booster for the BJP, the victory of the party candidates in areas where it does not have elected representatives before is a sign that people can no longer ignore the BJP and dismiss it as an “also ran”, ridiculing it as a party that gets less votes than NOTA.
So far, the BJP had a somewhat strong presence in Kanyakumari and a few pockets in western Tamil Nadu like Coimbatore and adjoining areas. The fact that nobody took the BJP seriously and ignored it does not hold good now. What is more significant is that the BJP under Annamalai performed much better than seemingly more popular local party leaders like Kamal Haasan, Sreeman and TTV Dinakaran. Kamal Haasan scored a zero once again in this urban body polls too.
“Now what this good showing does for the BJP is that it can bargain for more seats in the Lok Sabha elections from a considerably weakened AIADMK,” said political analyst GC Shekhar.
Tamil Nadu state unit president Annamalai declared that the alliance with AIADMK will continue into the 2024 general elections to the Lok Sabha.
For the AIADMK, though it is still the dominant Opposition party and an alternative to the ruling DMK, it must resolve its dual leadership issue if it wants to remain the potent political force it has been under J Jayalalithaa.
What is more important is that in many places BJP lost by slender margin. In Chennai, the DMK fort, BJP candidates finished runners-up in 30 wards. In Kongu region of western Tamil Nadu, the combined votes of the AIADMK and the BJP are more than the DMK’s. Had the two fought the elections jointly, chances are that they could have bagged the Kongu region.
But the performance of the BJP, if one were to put it into perspective, shows that it still has a long way to go to come anywhere near its growth in West Bengal.
Just consider the scale of DMK victory: In a thumping victory, the DMK won 946 of the total 1,373 municipal corporation seats and 2,360 in municipalities of the total 3,842 seats, and 4,388 seats in panchayats out of 7,605 seats. The AIADMK was a distant second, winning little over 2,000 ward member posts.
The writer is a political analyst based in Chennai. Views expressed are personal.
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February 23, 2022 at 06:29PM
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