Trojan Horse

Ahead of the 2026 Tamil Nadu assembly elections, at a high-profile press conference in Chennai on 11 April, the union home minister Amit Shah formally announced the revival of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s alliance with the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. Flanked by the AIADMK’s general secretary, Edappadi K Palaniswami, and the BJP’s outgoing state president, K Annamalai, Shah confirmed that the upcoming campaign would be led by Palaniswami, signalling a tactical pivot. While Shah’s visit was ostensibly to appoint a new state BJP chief, the subtext was clear: the price of alliance was the removal of Annamalai. It is part of a long-term strategy to form the government in Tamil Nadu by 2031.

Annamalai, a former IPS officer and once the BJP’s great Tamil hope, had transformed the party’s image in the state. Under his leadership, the BJP’s vote share surged from a negligible 3.6 percent in 2019 to over 11 percent in 2024, thanks to high-decibel campaigns such as En Mann, En Makkal—my soil, my people. But his aggressive anti-Dravidian stance strained relations with AIADMK, particularly after his criticism of icons J Jayalalithaa and CN Annadurai, leading to the alliance’s collapse in September 2023. To stitch the coalition back together, the RSS ideologue S Gurumurthy—who has often served as a bridge between the BJP’s central leadership and regional forces—is said to have played a vital part. Shortly before the conference, a meeting took place at his Mylapore residence, during which Shah, Annamalai and the union minister for information and broadcasting and parliamentary affairs, L Murugan, were present. Soon after, the BJP replaced Annamalai with Nainar Nagendran, a former AIADMK leader from the Thevar community.

There was an underlying caste consideration behind this shift. Both Annamalai and Palaniswami are Gounders from western Tamil Nadu, which created rivalry between the two parties over the same voter base. Nagendran’s appointment aimed to consolidate southern districts, where Thevars hold sway, aligning with the BJP’s social engineering strategy. A three-time MLA from Tirunelveli—twice under AIADMK and once with the BJP—Nagendran has demonstrated his ability to navigate loyalties across party lines and is a formidable local leader. His AIADMK lineage makes him a convenient bridge for the revived alliance. But his appointment also represents a recalibration after the BJP’s Hindutva playbook met with limited success in the Dravidian heartland.

The BJP’s failure to effect its ideological template in Tamil Nadu, so far, has been most evident in its handling of the Thiruparankundram controversy—a manufactured communal flashpoint in Madurai district that backfired spectacularly thanks to the state’s deep-rooted commitment to the legacy of Dravidian icon Periyar. This is a state where Hindu children are taken to dargahs, Muslims are given the ceremonial mudhal mariyadhai in temples, meaning the first respect as a mark of reverence to local Muslim communities that would have contributed to the Hindu temples. In Periyar’s land, rationalism grows alongside spirituality, something Hindutva elements cannot grasp.