Tamil Nadu BJP President K Annamalai recently hit back at DMK's Kanimozhi Karunanidhi after she mocked him for not winning any seat in the southern state. Annamalai, who spearheaded the saffron party's campaign, contested from the Coimbatore Lok Sabha seat but lost to DMK's Ganpathy Rajkumar. The NDA, which comprises 7 parties besides the BJP, could not win any seat even though its vote share went up.
However, Kanimozhi said Annamalai's loss in Coimbatore showed that there was no place for the BJP in Tamil Nadu. She also said that Annamalai's continuation as BJP's Tamil Nadu chief was not good.
Responding to Kanimozhi's remarks, Annamalai said: "If my father was Karunanidhi, I too would have won all elections easily in Tamil Nadu. My father's name is Kuppuswamy. He is a farmer and nobody in my family has got any smell of politics. He studied till 10th standard. My mother studied till the sixth standard. They are living in a village, doing farming. I am their son. My winning would be slow."
Annamalai also backed the BJP's campaign saying it was not wrong to set an ambitious target. "What PM Narendra Modi has done for Tamil Nadu and Kerala, the results are showing. Our vote share has gone up. We need to stay on the course," he said. The BJP, for the first time, won a seat in Kerala.
The DMK-led alliance swept the state by winning all 39 Lok Sabha seats. Kanimozhi, who contested from Thoothukkudi, won the seat by nearly 4 lakh votes.
Annamalai said he regretted that the Tamil Nadu BJP could not send MPs from the state. "Our vote share has gone up. This will be a learning step. In the next election, BJP will emerge victorious," Annamalai said, adding that the saffron party would look into what went wrong in the next week and see how it can be rectified. "We accept the people's mandate. They wanted us to increase our vote share and that happened, but we could not win seats."
Even though the BJP failed to win any seat in Tamil Nadu, the saffron party has become the third largest party in terms of vote share, only behind DMK and AIADMK - two dominant forces in the southern state. The Congress, which bagged 9 seats in alliance with DMK, secured 10.67% of votes against BJP's 11.24%.
Also, the BJP and its allies came second on 12 seats, such as Coimbatore, Chennai South, Chennai Central, Madurai, Nilgiris, and Theni.