Tamil Nadu Congress Committee president K.S. Alagiri sprang a surprise on Friday by issuing a call to the cadre of the Tamil Maanila Congress (TMC) to rejoin the Congress, a statement that TMC president G.K. Vasan described as “shocking and without any validity”.
Mr. Alagiri’s statement came in the wake of a report in a Tamil daily on Thursday that Mr. Vasan was planning to merge the TMC with the BJP after the election results are announced. Mr. Vasan denied that there was any such plan.
Speaking to The Hindu, Mr. Vasan, who revived the TMC(M) in 2014, more than a decade after merging the party with the Congress, laughed off the overtures as being based on a “report that can be summed up as nothing but banter outside a tea shop”.