Congress leader Karti Chidambaram on Friday dubbed Kamal Haasan a “super-NOTA” and said the actor-turned-politician’s Makkal Neethi Maiam (MNM) will not win a single seat in the Tamil Nadu Assembly polls as it is “not a sustainable political party”.
The Congress MP from Sivaganga also slammed the AIADMK-BJP alliance and said the people of Tamil Nadu do not want a government which has any “stain, scent or shadow” of the BJP as its ‘Hindi-Hindutva’ agenda “irritates” them.
In an interview with PTI, Karti Chidambaram also claimed that the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam-Congress alliance will win over 200 out of the 234 Assembly seats in the single-phase April 6 polls.
The Congress leader also claimed that despite Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent visits to poll-bound Tamil Nadu and several top BJP leaders’ aggressive campaigning, the BJP’s “zero MLAs, zero MPs” status will remain. “They will remain at zero MLAs and zero MPs. The prime minister can make as many trips as he wants to Tamil Nadu, but the BJP’s Hindi-Hindutva policies will be roundly rejected by the people,” he told PTI.
Asked if Haasan and his outfit MNM will impact the polls, Karti Chidambaram said, “He (Haasan) is only a ‘super-NOTA’, he will not win a single seat and his is not a sustainable political party. They will only congregate for the elections and they will disperse after the elections.” The ‘None Of The Above’ (NOTA) option on electronic voting machines, was introduced in 2013. After the Supreme Court order in 2013, the EC added the NOTA button on the EVMs as the last option on the voting panel.
Key issues
On the key issues in the Tamil Nadu polls, Karti Chidambaram said the main issue was that of ten years of “non-performance” of the AIADMK. “The livelihood of the average person has not improved in Tamil Nadu. Then there is the rampant mis-governance and corruption by the AIADMK. It has favoured a few in giving out public contracts, there has been a huge siphoning of resources as well as poor quality of work by the public works department,” he said.