The AIADMK’s district secretaries met at the party headquarters in Chennai for about an hour on Tuesday to discuss preparations for the Lok Sabha election.
Party general secretary Edappadi K. Palaniswami, who chaired the meeting, advised his colleagues to ensure that AIADMK supporters were not left out of the electoral rolls. Mr. Palaniswami was also said to have asked them to ensure that the right persons were deployed at the polling booths.
The timing of the meeting aroused curiosity as BJP leader and Union Minister for Commerce Piyush Goyal, during his visit to the city on Monday, reiterated the BJP’s non-committal stance vis à vis the AIADMK, which had been saying that it would not have any truck with the national party, not only for the Lok Sabha election but also for the 2026 Assembly poll. But “it was a routine meeting”, a senior office-bearer of the AIADMK said.
When asked whether the party would send its delegates to Ayodhya to take part in the consecration of the Ram temple later this month, D. Jayakumar, AIADMK organisation secretary, said that the party [leadership] would take a decision.
Referring to Chief Minister M.K. Stalin’s announcement that the latest edition of the Global Investors Meet (GIM) had attracted investment proposals to the tune of around ₹6.64 lakh crore with the potential of generating 27 lakh jobs, Mr. Jayakumar wondered what happened to the DMK’s assurance on employment generation during the 2021 Assembly election. “They [the DMK regime] are yet to fill even 3.5 lakh vacancies in the government,” he said.
Later in the day, Mr. Palaniswami, in a message on his social media handle, welcomed the Supreme Court quashing the orders releasing 11 men convicted for the heinous gang-rape and murder of several members of a family during the Gujarat pogrom in 2002.
Meanwhile, AMMK general secretary T.T.V. Dhinakaran, in a statement, said after the DMK came to power, no improvement seemed to have taken place with regard to infrastructure, single window clearance, uninterrupted power supply and land allotment. If the required infrastructure had not been made available, the memoranda of understanding signed during the GIM would remain only on paper. That there was no mention of giving preference to youngsters of the State in jobs to be created through project proposals covered under the MoU had disappointed the youth.
