Annamalai responds to Kanimozhi’s jibe about election loss
Tamil Nadu BJP chief K Annamalai on Wednesday took a dig at DMK’s Kanimozhi Karunanidhi after she mocked him for never winning an election. Annamalai was contesting the Coimbatore Lok Sabha seat but lost to DMK’s Ganpathy Rajkumar.
During a media interaction, Kanimozhi had mocked Annamalai’s poll loss in Coimbatore and said the people of Tamil Nadu have made it clear that there is no place for the BJP. “Annamalai’s continuation as BJP’s Tamil Nadu chief is not good,” she added.
Reacting to Kanimozhi’s attack at him, Annamalai said, “If my father was Karunanidhi, I too would have won elections by now. My father’s name is Kuppuswamy, so it will take some time for me to win elections.”
Annamalai also backed the BJP’s campaign in Tamil Nadu and said it was not wrong to set an ambitious target. “What PM Narendra Modi has done for Tamil Nadu and Kerala, the results are showing. Our vote share has gone up. We need to stay on the course,” he said.
Annamalai, a former IPS officer of the Karnataka cadre, joined the BJP in 2019 and became the president of the party’s Tamil Nadu unit in 2021. He was contesting the Coimbatore seat against DMK’s Ganpathy Rajkumar, who defeated him by over 1,18,000 votes.
Candidates belonging to the DMK and its allies, including star nominee Kanimozhi, won by huge margins in Tamil Nadu, and the BJP-led NDA did not manage to win even one seat. Kanimozhi retained her Thoothukkudi seat by bagging 5,40,729 votes.