The All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) on Wednesday empowered party general secretary J Jayalalitha to decide on the alliance issue, though no elections are round the corner, even as she sought to keep the morale of the cadres high by claiming that the days of the DMK government were numbered and her party would bounce back to power in Tamil Nadu.
The general council and executive of the party, which met at Vanagaram on the outskirts of the city, by a resolution also demanded the dismissal of the DMK government for its alleged failure to arrest the “deteriorating” law and order situation.
The party demanded action against Chief Minister M Karunanidhi for penning a poem lamenting the death of LTTE’s political wing leader S P Tamilselven in a Sri Lankan air raid. The resolution said that by supporting a banned outfit Karunanidhi had violated the oath of allegiance to the Constitution. On the alliance issue, the AIADMK stands virtually isolated at the moment.
It has only the MDMK as its major ally. After a brief foray into the third front of United Progressive National Alliance, Jayalalitha has pulled out and is now moving closer to the BJP as was evident from the lunch she hosted to Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi after his recent electoral victory.
With the Congress firmly entrenched in the DMK camp, her only option at the national level is to gravitate towards the BJP. Preparing the cadres for the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, Jayalalitha said her party had a very bright future and it would rule the entire nation, not just Tamil Nadu, an oblique reference to the 1998-99 period when it was part of the Vajpayee government.
Even as the AIADMK executive meeting was on, actor-turned politician and party legislator from Mylapore in Chennai, Mr S V Shekhar created a flutter by going to the Secretariat to meet the Speaker, triggering speculation that he had gone to submit his resignation.
Shekhar, who has for some time been sidelined, however, denied that he planned to quit the party even as AIADMK men besieged him.
As he was chatting with the media, he was summoned over the telephone by the party and was whisked away to the meeting venue. But by then the meeting, to which he was not initially invited, was over.