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On the last day of the 17th Lok Sabha on February 9, Prime Minister Narendra Modi joined eight Members of Parliament, including Union minister L Murugan, for lunch in a canteen in Parliament. Murugan is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate for the Nilgiris seat against Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK)’s A Raja, a former Union telecom minister, who defeated AIADMK candidate M. Thiyagarajan by a margin of over 200,000 votes in 2019. Raja had won the seat in 2009 but failed to retain it in the 2014 elections. The AIADMK has fielded Lokesh Tamilselvan, and Naam Tamilar Katchi’s A Jayakumar makees it a four-cornered contest.
The Nilgiris constituency, reserved for Scheduled Castes, is one of the few, such as Kanniyakumari and Coimbatore, where the BJP has had electoral success in Tamil Nadu in the past. The BJP’s Master Mathan won the seat in 1998 and 1999. The constituency is a rare one that covers parts of four districts — Erode, Coimbatore, Tiruppur, and Nilgiris.
The contestants are reaching out to plantation and construction workers, and also the Badagas, the largest ethno-linguistic groups in the Nilgiris. The BJP has lately found support among the Badagas, which had its candidate losing to the Congress in the 2021 Assembly polls by a thin margin. In his campaigning, Murugan has criticised Raja for the latter’s “anti-Hindu speeches”.
