It was a Bharatiya Janata Party worker who led the Chennai Super Kings to victory in the IPL final held at the Narendra Modi stadium in Ahmedabad, helping the team equal Mumbai Indians for the most number of IPL titles, Tamil Nadu BJP president K Annamalai said in an interview to News 18 Tamil Nadu.
The Chennai Super Kings defeated the Gujarat Titans in a thrilling clash that went right down to the wire. In the end, it was all-rounder Ravindra Jadeja’s 10 runs off the last two deliveries of the match that enabled the Mahendra Singh Dhoni-led CSK to tide over the mammoth 214-run total put up by the Hardik Pandya-led side.
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“Jadeja is a BJP karyakarta and he is from Gujarat. His wife is a BJP MLA. I am also proud as a Tamilian. There were more Tamil people in GT than in CSK and I will celebrate that as well,” said Annamalai. He was responding to a question by the interviewer on the DMK’s message that the CSK’s win was a “victory of the Dravidian model over the Gujarat model”.
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The president of the state unit of the BJP also heaped praise on Sai Sudarshan, another Tamilian who plays for Gujarat Titans. “96 runs were scored by a Tamilian, we will celebrate that also. Not a single Tamilian played in CSK. But we still celebrate CSK because of MS Dhoni. We are proud that the winning run was scored by a BJP karyakarta,” he added.
While Jadeja has been open in his support to the BJP, it could not be independently verified if the cricketer is a BJP member. His wife Rivaba Jadeja, however, is a BJP MLA from Gujarat’s Jamnagar North Assembly seat. Rivaba joined the BJP in 2019 and contested the Gujarat Assembly elections in 2022, winning by a margin of over 80,000 votes.