Tamil Nadu: DMK and Congress Launch Attacks on BJP’s Annamalai

Chennai: Both the DMK and the Congress launched scathing attacks on BJP State president K Annamalai on Thursday targeting him for different reasons with the DMK turning the tables against the BJP for the allegation that 12 MPs of the DMK had criminal cases pending against them.

The DMK’s official newspaper, Murasoli, carried a hard-hitting editorial titled ‘Ethanai Soodu Patalum Thirunthata Jenmam’ (The creature that would not reform even if it burns its fingers repeatedly) saying that Annamalai had not changed despite the charges he made against others boomeranging on him.

Apart from BJP Minister and Malayalam actor Suresh Gopi facing ‘crime against women’ charges, there were two other Ministers in the Narendra Modi cabinet, Shantanu Takur and Sukanta Mujamdar, who were facing murder charges (IPC 307), the editorial said.

Annamalai had quoted a report of an NGO, Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR), based on the details in the affidavits filed along with the nominations by the candidates for the Lok Sabha polls, the editorial said, adding that he had not realized that in the process he was exposing the rampant criminality among the BJP candidates.

It said that the DMK members had only ‘petty crime’ charges against them while the BJP members were facing grave charges like murder, attempt to murder, kidnapping and crimes against women. In fact 26 of the 71 Ministers faced criminal charges, it said.

The ADR report only talked about the criminal cases of Lok Sabha members and if the affidavits of the Rajya Sabha members were taken into account, one might wonder if the party should be called the Bharatiya Janata Party or the Bhartiya Criminal Party, the DMK newspaper said.

TNCC president K Selvaperunthogai also targeted Annamalai for his message posted on X that the Union BJP government had provided Rs one lakh crore worth of assistance to Tamil Nadu through various schemes in the last 10 years whereas the Congress-led UPA government made available just Rs 8,054 crore worth of assistance in 10 years.

Describing the UPA rule as a ‘golden period’ when the GDP showed remarkable growth like 9.5 per cent, 9.7 per cent and 9.3 per cent unlike the BJP rule in which it was struggling to show a growth rate of 6 or 7 per cent, he said the country borrowed 100 lakh crore during the 10 year tenure of BJP as against the 55 lakh crore borrowed in 67 years of Congress rule.