BJP May Not Win Any Seat In Tamil Nadu But Has Managed To Dent AIADMK's Prospects In Many

Despite heightened expectations from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for the 2024 elections in Tamil Nadu and exit polls indicating that it could win a few seats in the state, the party has been unable to open its account.

However, there are still a few positives for the party. Its vote share has more than doubled as compared to 2019 and it has been able to push the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) to third or fourth place in some seats (as per the leads shown in the Election Commission of India website at the time of writing.)

Chennai South

In this seat, Tamilisai Soundararajan, a former state president of the BJP is in second position. The incumbent MP, Thamizhachi Thangapandian of the DMK, is leading the seat by over 46,000 votes. J Jayavardhan of the AIADMK, who is the son of the party’s organising secretary D Jayakumar is in the third position and is behind Thangapandian by around 92,000 votes.

Coimbatore

While BJP state president K Annamalai was expected to win the seat, he is trailing behind DMK’s Ganapathy Rajkumar by around 36,000 votes. The AIADMK candidate, Singai G Ramachandran, is a distant third and is trailing by over 1 lakh votes. 

Kanyakumari

While the seat is known to be a battle between the BJP and the Congress, what was not expected is that the AIADMK would be pushed to the fourth place, i.e., behind Naam Tamilar Katchi (NTK) of Seeman. The NTK usually gets about 7-8 per cent of the vote share across the state.

Madurai

Professor Rama Sreenivasan of the BJP is in the second position here. Su Venkatesan of the CPI(M), the incumbent MP of the constituency is leading. The gap between the BJP and the third placed AIADMK candidate is around 10,000 votes.

Tirunelveli

In this constituency, Nainar Nagendran of the BJP is trailing Robert Bruce of the Congress. The AIADMK is in fourth position, behind the NTK. However, the gap between the two is not much, ie, around 2,000 votes.

While these are the seats where the BJP itself is contesting against the AIADMK, there are a few other seats, like Dharmapuri, Theni and Vellore, where alliance partners of the BJP are ahead of the AIADMK.

While Soumya Anbumani of the PMK is leading in Dharmapuri, T T V Dhinakaran and A C Shanmugam are in the second position in Theni and Vellore, respectively.

In Chennai Central, Vinoj P Selvam, a state secretary of the BJP, is in second position. The AIADMK has given the seat to its alliance partner, the Desiya Murpokku Dravida Kazhagam, the party of late actor Vijayakanth.