A day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the BJP is open to alliances and "cherishes its old friends", AIADMK joint coordinator and Tamil Nadu chief minister Edappadi K Palaniswami said his party would support only those who do good for the state while DMK president MK Stalin asserted that his party would never align with BJP again.
Both AIADMK and DMK which was in the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance in 1998 and 1999-2003 respectively reacted to Modi's comment on Thursday that the BJP led NDA's door are open to old friends and that they could join the alliance as they had done when AB Vajpayee was the Prime Minister.
"Our stand is whoever comes to power at the centre, we will extend support if they do good for the state. We will never accept anyone who betrays the interests of the people of Tamil Nadu," Palaniswami said, adding that his party follows the footsteps of former chief ministers MG Ramachandran and J Jayalalithaa.
DMK chief Stalin who proposed Congress president Rahul Gandhi as Prime Ministerial candidate said that Modi was not Atal Bihari Vajpayee and it was an irony that he compared himself with the former Prime Minister who passed away in August last year.
Stalin said late party chief M Karunanidhi had called Vajpayee the right person in a wrong party. "Modi comparing himself with Vajpayee is only a joke. It is nothing but Modi's campaign strategy for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections," he said, adding that it is only for the sake of boosting the country's economic growth that Vajpayee wanted a stable government. "It was only due to this that the DMK joined the alliance which had a common minimum programme. We did not support the Vajpayee government's policy which was against the country. We walked out of the alliance once the communalism started to raise its head," said Stalin.
The BJP's doors are "always open", Modi said when asked by a BJP worker if the party would ally with AIADMK, DMK or Rajinikanth during a video conference. "Twenty years ago, visionary leader Atalji brought in a new culture in Indian politics, that of successful coalition politics. He gave utmost importance to regional aspirations...BJP has followed the way Atalji has shown us," he said.
BJP's Tamil Nadu unit president Dr Tamilisai Soundararajan said that Prime Minister's invitation was not meant for DMK which had already announced its alliance with Congress. "I don't know why DMK is responding for Prime Minister when he did not even consider them," she said. BJP has been hoping to have an alliance with the ruling AIADMK which was weakened and fractured after J Jayalalithaa's death.
WHAT MODI SAID
The BJP’s doors are “always open”, Modi said when asked by a BJP worker if the party would ally with AIADMK, DMK or Rajinikanth during a video conference.
