Tamil Nadu Chief Minister and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam chief J Jayalalithaa has said the Lok Sabha result in the state was not a verdict against her government, and the polls were meant to decide who would rule at the Centre.
The AIADMK front, of which the Bharatiya Janata Party was part, did not win even one seat out of the 39 in the state, or the lone Pondicherry seat.
Accepting the verdict with a 'bowed head', Jayalalithaa said a in statement in Chennai late on Thursday night that the results did not reflect the opinion of the people against the state government. However, opposition parties were speaking as if the verdict was against the state government's performance and had demanded her resignation, the statement said.
'It is ridiculous that some parties are assuming that the verdict of the Lok Sabha elections as a verdict against the AIADMK government,' she said.
The chief minister said in the 1989 polls, when Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam president M Karunanidhi was the chief minister, the AIADMK alliance had won 39 of the 40 seats, including Pondicherry. Even the one seat the alliance had lost had gone to the Communist Party of India and not to the DMK.
'But at that time Karunanidhi did not consider the DMK's defeat in all the Lok sabha constituencies as a verdict
against his Government, nor did he resign,' she said, adding that in 1998 too the AIADMK alliance had won 30 seats, but the Karunanidhi government did not resign.