Tamil Nadu BJP president K. Annamalai, the “stormy petrel” of state politics, will be spending three months in the cool retreat of Oxford University from September.

He has been chosen for the Chevening Gurukul Fellowship for Leadership Programme, to be conducted by the department of politics and international relations at
Oxford.

The party leadership has given the nod despite its antipathy for the West’s elite institutions of higher learning and their critical, liberal ethos, as encapsulated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s remark suggesting “hard work” was superior to “Harvard”.

Modi had made the comment in early 2017 against the backdrop of Harvard professor and Economics Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s criticism of the November 2016 demonetisation.

Annamalai told reporters he would be leaving on September 1, a day before the programme was to begin. “I shall return in the second week of November,” he said.

He thanked Modi and party national president J.P. Nadda for allowing him to participate in the Oxford fellowship programme at a difficult time for the party.

The BJP failed to win any of Tamil Nadu’s 39 seats during the general election, with Annamalai himself defeated by DMK candidate Ganapathy Rajkumar from Coimbatore.

Annamalai denied that his three-month break owed to the high command’s disappointment over the rout from Tamil Nadu under his leadership that stymied Modi’s vaunted “southern push”.

In Annamalai’s absence, veteran RSS man Kesava Vinayagam, currently the organisational general secretary of the Tamil Nadu BJP, will be “interim president” of the state unit, party sources confirmed in Chennai.

Annamalai rejected claims of a “vacuum” in the state unit in his absence.

“This is not a one-man-centric organisation; the BJP has a decentralised leadership. There are headquarters and district functionaries, and even in my absence all the party work will continue,” he said.

Senior BJP functionaries Arvind Menon and Sudhakar Reddy, who are in charge of the party’s Tamil Nadu affairs, will spend more time in the state during this absence, he said.

Vinayagam, 72, known for his social work through Seva Bharati, an RSS arm, is from the southern district of Kanyakumari, where the BJP has a strong presence.

His work in rehabilitating Kanyakumari’s fisherfolk after the 2004 tsunami had earned him praise and led to his deputation to the BJP for party work, a state BJP source said.