CHENNAI: A decision on forging an alliance between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) in Tamil Nadu will be taken closer to the 2026 assembly elections, AIADMK general secretary Edappadi K Palaniswami, or EPS, said on Wednesday, a day after he met Union home minister Amit Shah late on Tuesday.
Palaniswami insisted that he only discussed problems faced by people and sought the central government’s intervention to solve them, and not the contours of an alliance at his meeting with Amit Shah.
The AIADMK had broken up with the BJP in September 2023, accusing the Tamil Nadu BJP president K Annamalai of insulting their leaders and Dravidian stalwarts including J Jayalalithaa. But the two former allies, who fought separately, did not win a single seat in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections while the the DMK-led alliance swept all 39 LS seats in Tamil Nadu,
“We spoke to him about people’s problems. We spoke in detail for 45 minutes. Tamil Nadu is heading in the wrong direction,” EPS, who is also leader of opposition in the TN assembly, told reporters in Delhi, declaring that he was in the national capital to visit AIADMK’s newly opened office and had sought an appointment with Shah only to raise issues of the state.
“We sought the Centre’s intervention to put a full stop to the problems,” EPS said, adding that he raised multiple issues such as deteriorating law and order, and the Enforcement Directorate’s raids against TASMAC (Tamil Nadu State Marketing Corporation), the strengthening of the Mullaperiyar dam, linking of the Cauvery and Godavari rivers.
Asked about the possible alliance between the two parties, EPS said there was nothing to say at the moment. “Is there an election now?” EPS asked, declaring that “only close to elections, will an alliance be decided. Alliance and ideology are different. “Our ideology is intact. Alliance will change as per situation and opportunity. Will all allies remain in DMK forever? The next election is only next March. There is a year for us to decide on these things.”
EPS said he had asked Amit Shah to ensure that Tamil Nadu’s parliamentary seats did not reduce in the delimitation exercise based on population, a reference to the campaign led by the Tamil Nadu chief minister MK Stalin against the delimitation exercise – originally scheduled for 2026 – that will redefine the number of representatives a state sends to the Lok Sabha on the basis of population.
A joint action committee comprising chief ministers of four states and political leaders from three others who met on Saturday in Chennai asked the Centre to extend the freeze on the delimitation of parliamentary constituencies by another 25 years.
To be sure, calculations show that if the number of Lok Sabha seats are increased proportional to the population of states, the more populous but poorer northern states will see their relative representation in Parliament expand at the expense of the prosperous but less populous southern states that have done far better in population control over the last few decades.
On Tuesday, Annamalai told reporters that there was nothing political about the meeting with Amit Shah but predicted that the NDA would expand “in the coming days”. “Our only goal is to defeat the DMK,” he said.