A viral video, blame game & clarification: It's open season on Tamil Nadu BJP leaders after poll setback

A grab from the video in which Amit Shah is purportedly scolding Tamilisai

Sometimes, all it takes to stir a political controversy is a one-minute video clip. As former Telangana governor and the unsuccessful Lok Sabha BJP candidate from Tamil Nadu, Tamilisai Soundararajan, found out when a brief interaction that followed an exchange of greetings with Union Home Minister Amit Shah during the swearing-in ceremony of Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu on June 12 provided enough grist for the gossip mill.

Nothing from the interaction between Shah and Soundararajan was audible in the clip, but that was just as well for those trying to put her down. Shah could be seen wagging his finger at Soundararajan as if in reprimand, and Soundararajan was captured waving her hands as if in refutation.

Viral Video: Union Home Minister Amit Shah caught on camera reprimanding Tamilisai Soundararajan at Chandrababu Naidu’s swearing-in ceremony. #AmitShah #TamilNaduPolitics pic.twitter.com/DRiw6GInkH

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— H A R S H W A R D H A N (@MalvaniPorgo) June 12, 2024

But the episode brought out the undercurrents in the state unit of the BJP. BJP Tamil Nadu Social Media Cell Vice President Karthik Gopinath commented on X, “That looks like a strong admonishment from Amit Shah ji to Tamilisai akka. But what could be the reason for this ‘public’ warning? Unwarranted public comments?”

Gopinath, a supporter of Annamalai, got a riposte from Kalyan Raman, a former BJP intellectual wing office bearer and a supporter of Soundararajan: “What is happening is gleeful misinterpretation / jumping the gun, once again being engineered by @annamalai_k, to keep himself afloat from facing voice of dissent emanating from people like me. Voice of dissent leads to course correction. Any effort to suppress the voice will lead to collapse of the party system, which is already damaged under the presidentship of Annamalai.”

If the BJP had won a majority on its own in the Lok Sabha, the wipe out in Tamil Nadu might not have been a point of discussion at all. But with the party falling short of 272 at the national level, what was seen as a bold political gamble in Tamil Nadu is now being viewed as a bad miscalculation.

When BJP state president K Annamalai pushed for the party contesting without the AIADMK, he knew the risk, and was not expecting more than three or four seats, and maybe a total of five or six for the alliance as a whole from the 39 seats in Tamil Nadu. The strategy was to invest in the long term growth of the party by leading an alliance without the AIADMK. A second place finish in terms of vote share would have counted as success.

But, as it happened, the BJP not only drew a blank in Tamil Nadu, but its vote share of 11.10 percent was not much more than half of the AIADMK's 20.48.

There was thus very little to draw comfort from the results. And, not surprisingly, the Annamalai tactic of alienating the AIADMK in a bid to shore up the BJP's vote bank was viewed by his rivals within the party as a failure. Chief among his detractors was Soundararajan, a former state unit president (2014-19), who finished second in the South Chennai Lok Sabha constituency.

Soundarajan had supported AIADMK leader SP Velumani’s claim that if the two parties were in alliance, it would have won 35 seats, terming it “realistic”. Also, in an interview, she seemed to implicitly criticise Annamalai: “I didn’t encourage anti-social elements. But, recently anti-social elements have been taken into the party. I have no doubt that he is a good leader. All I’m saying is we all are different types of leaders and we take different decisions.”

Matters would have rested here but for the video clip from the footage of the swearing-in ceremony of Chandrababu Naidu as Andhra Pradesh chief minister going viral on social media. After initially declining to comment, Soundararajan clarified her exchange with Shah in a post.

But much damage in terms of speculation was already done in the meantime. Supporters of Annamalai saw the clip as evidence of the national leadership's disapproval of Soundararajan's remarks that supposedly targeted Annamalai, and friends of Soundararajan in the party downplayed the clip as just normal greetings between the two.

Tiruchi Sooriya Siva took issue with Tamilisai: “When you were there (as state unit president of the BJP), no one was willing to join the party. Why moan!”

Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. The Tamil Nadu unit of the BJP is learning this the hard way. The rifts in the party are in the open after the setback in Tamil Nadu.