Chennai: After having stitched a rainbow coalition, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Thursday fielded its Tamil Nadu unit chief K Annamalai from the prestigious Coimbatore Lok Sabha seat in western Tamil Nadu, while allotting Chennai (South) to former Telangana Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan and Nilgiris to Union Minister L Murugan.
The party fielded heavyweights like BJP Legislature Party leader Nainar Nagendran from his own seat of Tirunelveli, educationists A C Shanmugam of the New Justice Party and T R Pariventhar of Indiya Jananayaga Katchi from Vellore and Perambalur constituencies, respectively. Choosing veteran politician Pon Radhakrishnan for Kanyakumari, the BJP nominated Vinoj P Selvam from Chennai (Central), and C Narasimhan from Krishnagiri in the first list of candidates announced for nine Lok Sabha seats.
Murugan, who was recently elected for a second term to the Rajya Sabha from Madhya Pradesh, will take on former Union Telecom Minister A Raja in Nilgiris (SC), while the opponents of Shanmugam and Pariventhar are D M Kathir Anand and K N Arun Nehru, sons of DMK heavyweights Durai Murugan and K N Nehru, respectively.
The choice of Annamalai in Coimbatore, a predominantly urban seat, is interesting as the BJP believes it has a chance of winning the seat dominated by entrepreneurial Gounders, the caste to which the former Karnataka-cadre IPS officer belongs, and cash-rich Naickers.
The BJP is also banking on the traditional Hindu votes in Coimbatore, a communally-sensitive city with a history of communal clashes between Hindus and Muslims, besides its organisational strength. Coimbatore (South) constituency has a BJP MLA in Vanathi Srinivasan.
C P Radhakrishnan of the BJP has won from Coimbatore in 1998 and 1999 in an alliance with AIADMK and DMK, respectively. Radhakrishnan, who is now the Governor of Jharkhand, lost the 2014 elections just by 42,000 votes even as the BJP contested as part of the Third Front.
The BJP believes Coimbatore is a “positive seat” for the party and that’s the reason Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the city on March 18 for his first roadshow in Tamil Nadu as the party has been working on the ground quietly for the past two years. Annamalai, who is a native of Karur, will be locked in an intense battle with Ganapathi P Rajkumar of the DMK and ‘Singai’ G Ramachandran of the AIADMK.
Coimbatore promises to be a political potboiler with the DMK specifically getting the seat from its ally CPI (M) this time – it was in 1996 that the ruling party won from here. It lost the elections in 1998, and 2014, while it allotted the seat to alliance partners in 1999, 2004, 2009, and 2019 – apparently to put up a tough fight against the BJP and Annamalai.
Murugan from Nilgiris (SC) was on expected lines as the Union Minister of State had almost made the picturesque district his home for the past one year. One of the focus constituencies, Nilgiris was being groomed for Murugan, who hails from Arunthathiyar community, a sub-caste of Dalits, who are spread across the western region of the state.
Nagendran, a heavyweight and a strategist, is sure to give a tough fight to the Congress in Tirunelveli, while Radhakrishnan, who hails from the dominant Nadar community, will also face a Congress nominee. The BJP is investing much in Tamil Nadu with Prime Minister Modi himself visiting the state seven times since the start of 2024.
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