Sounds of a shotgun wedding

A long-speculated union finally took place on April 11. After several unsuccessful attempts, the BJP and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) announced their alliance for the 2026 Tamil Nadu Assembly elections. But their coming together has not yet generated the enthusiasm that should have accompanied this landmark occasion. Both sides are assailed by self-doubt and resentment against the other.

The reasons are not far to seek. A smell of cordite hangs over the alliance. The view is widespread that AIADMK leader Edappadi Palaniswami — or EPS, as he is known — was pressured into the agreement. It gained ground because the Election Commission of India (ECI) began examining a petition to freeze the AIADMK’s precious two-leaves symbol on the very day that Union Home Minister Amit Shah was arriving in Chennai for alliance discussions.

Chronology samjhiye. On February 25, the Madras High Court lifts a stay on the ECI taking up the matter. The court entered the picture when a Tamil Nadu resident petitioned it early last year, weeks ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, saying that the ECI had not responded to his pleas to freeze the AIADMK symbol pending the disposal of civil suits over the party’s leadership. This refers to the struggle in the party between EPS and his challenger OPS, or O Panneerselvam, former Chief Minister, who was Jayalalithaa’s chosen proxy for the chair when she was convicted and disqualified.

When the court heard the petition in November 2024, the ECI said it would take up the matter in a week. The AIADMK asked the court for a stay, arguing that the ECI had no role in an intra-party dispute. That stay was granted in January this year, and lifted a month later.

In March, EPS visits Delhi, ostensibly to inaugurate the party’s new office, and meets Shah. The Home Minister is said to have set a deadline for the AIADMK to decide its course of action. EPS continues to talk down speculation that the two parties were close to tying the knot. And on April 4, the AIADMK votes against the Waqf Bill in the Rajya Sabha. April 11 dawns with the news that the AIADMK symbol is on the line, and ends with the news of the coming together of the two leaves and the lotus. Whatever happens to the civil suits in the AIADMK’s leadership challenge, the BJP has blessed EPS’s leadership for now.

On the ground, it seems followers of neither party are yet convinced of the value of this alliance. The main dampener for the local BJP is the perception that K Annamalai, who led the party’s state unit from 2021, and is credited with giving the party a statewide profile, was Shah’s sacrificial offering to EPS.

The BJP top brass has sought to mollify Annamalai and his followers with the sop that he will be deployed for something more important at the national level. The elevation of Nainar Nagenthran, a former AIADMK man, as the BJP’s new state chief has been explained as a move to keep a caste balance in the alliance. While Annamalai, like EPS, belongs to the Gounder community, Nagenthran is from the powerful Thevar community, which could help the BJP win influence in that group. But Nagenthran would be hard put to explain to fellow Thevars why the BJP ditched OPS, a respected Thevar himself, and sided with EPS in the AIADMK’s leadership battle.

While Nagenthran is expected to provide a healing touch to AIADMK-BJP tensions on account of Annamalai’s aggressive stance towards what he saw as another Dravidian party, BJP hardliners remain convinced that the party would have been better off going alone and increasing its vote share in the state than entering into an alliance with the AIADMK. Forget everything else, the BJP’s big campaign theme against the DMK as a “corrupt party” is seen as dead in the water with the AIADMK being as vulnerable to such an allegation.

The Enforcement Directorate’s recent allegation of a “deep-rooted and systemic corruption network” in the municipal administration and water supply department, along with connected searches and raids on properties linked to DMK minister KN Nehru, could be a sign of how the BJP plans to play this tune against the ruling DMK.

Still, caste-based alliances, not corruption, are the winning strategy in Tamil Nadu, it has been proved over and over again. On this front, the BJP is skating on thin ice. Its alliance partner in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, Pattali Makkal Katchi, which claims to represent the Vanniyar caste, is on the verge of a split. Founder S Ramadoss is against any truck with the BJP, while his son Anbumani Ramadoss is pulling in the opposite direction. Can the BJP-AIADMK alliance expand to include parties that will give it a broader caste base is a pertinent question.

In the AIADMK, the unease at joining hands with a national party that espouses anti-Dravidianism is palpable. Jayalalithaa was once seen as a Hindutva leader in a Dravidian party. But EPS is not Jayalalithaa. His party joined the DMK, the Congress and all regional parties to adopt a resolution against the Centre’s Waqf Bill. The BJP’s isolation in the Assembly was never more evident. He would have observed the fate of regional parties in alliance with the BJP in other parts of the country.

For now, the die is cast. Unless something changes, the 2026 elections will be fought between the DMK and its allies against the BJP-AIADMK combine. What keeps an Opposition party’s hopes alive in Tamil Nadu is that voters in the state are known to alternate between the DMK and the AIADMK. The only time this pattern broke in recent years was in 2016, when the Jayalalithaa-headed AIADMK won a second successive term.

It is true that the DMK faces strong anti-incumbent sentiments. But Chief Minister MK Stalin has raised the stakes in the coming election to the national level. He has pitched the themes of delimitation, language and cooperative federalism against the BJP’s centralising tendencies, as his main plank for next year’s elections, taking the conversation away from local issues.

Last week, the state government won one part of a running battle against the Governor, RN Ravi, when the Supreme Court upbraided him up for “illegally” denying assent to Bills adopted by the Assembly. Stalin called it a victory for all states.

On April 15, the DMK government upped the ante another notch by announcing the formation of a committee to study Centre-state relations. While the BJP and the AIADMK are preparing to fight an Assembly election, the Tamil Nadu CM is signalling that he is fighting a battle for the nation. It’s a clever move. But the election is a year away, and the BJP is more than capable of springing its own surprises.

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