On Wednesday, following the Tamil Nadu local body elections, Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and head of the party's I&T department, Amit Malviya, on Wednesday slammed Congress leader Rahul Gandhi for his remarks against BJP.
Malviya recollected the Wayanad MP’s comment on BJP not winning in Tamil Nadu and said that the Urban Local Body elections have proved him wrong. The BJP leader claimed that his party was now the third-largest in the southern state ahead of Congress.
On Feb 2, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi attacked the Union government and said that the BJP could never rule over Tamil Nadu.
Speaking first from the Opposition side in the Lok Sabha during the debate on the Motion of Thanks on the President's address, he said, “There are two visions of this country. One vision is that it is a union of states, meaning it is a negotiation, meaning it is a conversation, meaning I go to my brother in Tamil Nadu and I say, ‘what do you want?’ and he says, ‘this is what I want’. He then asks me ‘what do you want?’ and I say ‘this is what I want’. It is a partnership, it is not a kingdom. You will never, ever in your entire life, rule over the people of Tamil Nadu. It can’t be done.”
The DMK led by Chief Minister M K Stalin on Tuesday registered a convincing victory in the urban local body elections, winning all 21 city corporations and 128 out of the 138 municipalities in Tamil Nadu. The party also won 400 out of 489 town panchayats.
The AIADMK won 161 city corporation seats and 638 municipality seats. It also won 15 town panchayats (1,206 seats). For the AIADMK, the internal crisis as well as camaraderie with the BJP, which may have alienated its secular, minority vote base, could have been possible factors.
The BJP, which chose to contest alone in the urban local body polls, failed to make much of a mark, even as the national leadership brought in a young party chief, former IPS officer K Annamalai, who is in his 30s, to lead the party in Tamil Nadu.
In the 2011 local body polls, when urban and rural local bodies polls together, the BJP had won 241 seats (out of 20,606 seats) compared to 308 seats they won this time in urban local body polls (it contested from 42% of the total 12,664 seats). Of 308 seats, 200 were from a single district – Kanyakumari.
