Tamil Nadu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President K. Annamalai slammed Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) leader Dayanidhi Maran for calling him a "joker" and hitting back saying he is "useless without his family's surname." Addressing reporters, the Coimbatore MP candidate said, "Generally they say, one of the ugliest political parties in the country is the DMK. The DMK party is founded on the language of filth and if you look at DMK's history, their abuse of women, their intolerance for any newcomer and the kind of abusive language they brought into political vocabulary, nobody in our state has done over the last 70 years. " 

Annamalai then took a shot at Dayanidhi Maran saying "DMK stands for abuse at its worst. And, this is coming from a person Dayanidhi Maran. If you remove the word 'Maaran' from his name, he will not even get a job. He is totally useless without his family's surname. But unfortunately, when they know they are losing, DMK will always take recourse to abuse and filth." Annamalai further stated, "If the DMK is abusing me, I take it as a badge of honour because all of us are self-made people from the ground by virtue of hard work. We are standing in a position trying to serve our people, not like Mr. Maran or Mr. Stalin or Mr. Udhayanidhi." The BJP Tamil Nadu chief added that the DMK leaders are in politics "only because of their family initials."

BJP's K. Annamalai has been fielded against DMK's Ganapathy P Rajkumar and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam's (AIADMK) candidate Singai Ramachandran for the Lok Sabha seat in Coimbatore, while Dayanidhi Maran is contesting the polls from Chennai Central.