Strategic Retreat: Why the BJP is yielding ground to the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu

K ANNAMALAI SPEECH lasted just one minute at the nearly eight-hour long programme where the Bharatiya Janata Party announced its state-unit president for Tamil Nadu, on 12 April 2025. Annamalai, the outgoing president and former police officer, had, just the previous year, guided the BJP to its most successful electoral performance in the state ever. In the 2024 Lok Sabha election, without an alliance with either the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam or the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam—the two Dravidian titans who have ruled the state since 1967—Annamalai had gotten the saffron party 11.24 percent of the state’s votes, the only time it had ever entered the double digits, and more than thrice its take in in the previous election.

 Annamalai was without doubt the centre of that campaign, often getting more coverage from North Indian television channels than either chief minister MK Stalin, or the AIADMK’s supremo Edappadi K Palaniswami. In television appearances and public speeches, Annamalai had his textbook fiery, no-holds-barred shrillness, that had gathered around it significant support among young, disillusioned, urbane voters. At the April 2025 event, he was not wordy or boisterous. He simply said, “Thank you for letting me serve you for four years as the leader,” before vouching for his replacement Nainar Nagendran and returning to his seat.

In 2023, the AIADMK had broken away from the BJP’s National Democratic Alliance over Annamalai’s brand of politics. After resigning from the Indian Police Services just shy of the 2019 Lok Sabha election, Annamalai had initially moved to join a political party led by actor Rajinikanth—a long-term political effort of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in Tamil Nadu, managed by its primary fixer in the state, the auditor S Gurumurthy. But the superstar never took the plunge, and Annamalai joined the BJP in August 2020. In less than a year, he became not just its state-unit president, but a state chief given a longer leash than his veteran counterparts in other states. This was most visible in his brash speeches targeting the AIADMK, which had been in an on-again off-again alliance with the saffron party between 1998 and 2019. In all these periods, the BJP was always the far smaller partner in Tamil Nadu, given the regions’ limited purchase of Hindu nationalism. As a result, BJP leaders in the state too, had always attempted to maintain cordial relationships with AIADMK leaders and not spoken ill of their ideological progenitors.

Annamalai flipped this script. In an interview to an English daily in June 2023, he said that Tamil Nadu was one of the most corrupt states in India, pointing to the conviction of the former chief minister, the late J Jayalalithaa, who had iron-fistedly run the AIADMK for nearly thirty years and enjoyed the absolute reverence of her party’s cadre and leadership. He also trained his guns on the DMK’s founder CN Annadurai, who the breakaway AIADMK is named after. He claimed that in the 1950s, the Dravidian stalwart had made “remarks against the Hindu faith” and had to “hide in Madurai” from Muthuramalinga Thevar, a leader of the dominant Mukkulathor caste who has, in recent years, been co-opted by the Sangh Parivar in the state.