He is a Rajasthani not afraid to contest elections down South

He is contesting the Tamil Nadu assembly elections and he is a native of Rajasthan. Online commodities trader Krishna Nathani is the BJP candidate making his maiden bid for an assembly seat from the cosmopolitan Harbour constituency, which has a fair sprinkling of voters hailing from various states but has always voted for a Dravidian party.
While he was born in Chennai, Krishna soon moved to Kolkata where his father Govindlal Nathani was a dealer in machinery and spare parts.He was educated at the Frank Anthony Public School. While attending RSS camps there he learned the ropes of Hindutva. He returned to Chennai where he was admitted in the D G Vaishnav College to earn a Bachelor’s degree in business administration and a Masters in business economics.
“Generally businessmen from other states don’t want to come into mainstream politics as they don’t want to take on local parties fearing vendetta, but I want to change this mindset as our community has business stakes here,” said the BJP’s Chennai central district secretary in fluent Tamil. Union minister for ports and shipping Pon Radhakrishnan flagged off his campaign recently.
In a constituency, which has an estimated 1.82 lakh electorate, there are around 60,000 people from Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, UP, Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal. “While in previous elections many of them did not stir out of their homes to vote, this time they are aware that there is a candidate from Rajasthan who knows their problems and can take up their cause,” he told TOI.
At the same time, he is also reaching out to other voters in slums and tenements telling them that he was not trying for an assembly seat merely to take up their complaints on lack of civic amenities but to implement his vision of developing this British period settlement that houses various markets like bullion and spices. He wants to develop it into a tourist hub on the lines of souks on the waterfront in Dubai, which would usher in overall prosperity and boost livelihood of people. “But to achieve this, we need political will and a leader with a vision like Prime Minister Narendra Modi,” he tells residents on his door-to-door campaign clad in traditional white cotton veshti, linen shirt and a scarf.