Date : 8.12.

2010

Press Statement of

Selvi J JAYALALITHAA
General Secretary - AIADMK
Former Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu,
Leader of the Opposition - Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly

Like the Roman despot Nero, who reputedly chose to play on his
fiddle while his nation was burning, the equally despotic Karunanidhi
chose to relax with his ministerial team at a film function, while his state
was drowning in the fury of the monsoon. Hundreds have lost their lives.
Several thousand acres of crops have been submerged. Hundreds of
kilometers of roads have been damaged and lakhs of people have been
rendered homeless and are anxiously waiting for relief. At such a critical
time, Karunanidhi is busy with his favourite pastime. Attending filmi
functions!! His presence at the cassette release function of the film
Ilaignan came as no surprise. After all, by his own admission,
he has been paid an astounding Rs 45 lakhs for writing the script for the
film. What was appalling was that the entire Tamil Nadu Council of
Ministers was attending the function rather than attending to the woes
of the people.
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Interestingly, Karunanidhi used the platform of this function to

make an impassioned public defence of Andimuthu Raja, the prime
perpetrator of the Rs 1,76,379 crores Spectrum scam. By making an
odious comparison with a mythological story, he sought to make out
that Raja alone could not have perpetrated a scam of such enormity on
his own. How true! It is a tacit, if inadvertent admission of the fact that
Karunanidhi himself, his daughter Kanimozhi and many others are also
partners to the loot. Typical of Karunanidhi, the statement is also
loaded. It is a veiled threat to the Congress leadership to go slow on the
Spectrum investigation. If precipitate steps are taken to corner Raja,
Karunanidhi warns, then he will not hesitate to reveal the names of
some others directly or indirectly involved in the scam. The implication is
that such a revelation could be unpalatable to the Congress.
This is Karunanidhi’s way of blackmailing his alliance partner…
The nation has suffered a huge loss. This has been pointed out not
merely by the opposition and the media but by the Central Vigilance
Commissioner, the Comptroller & Auditor General of India and several
courts of law as well, including the Supreme Court of India. The CBI has
commenced investigations into the issue. The mere resignation of Raja
as telecom minister is not the end of the whole imbroglio. The inquiries
have to go beyond estimating the loss suffered by the nation.
The quantum of kickbacks for perpetrating this mega scam has to be
ascertained. The beneficiaries of these kickbacks have to be questioned.
The money trail has to be traced. The money has to be recovered. The
guilty have to be punished. And the people have to be kept informed on
a day-to-day basis of the developments. Justice has to not only be done,
it should be seen to have been done. For this, the only recourse is a
Joint Parliamentary Committee probe. This is what the opposition parties
have been demanding. But the Government has been stonewalling.
Parliament has been practically dysfunctional for the best part of three
weeks, with the Government showing no signs of relenting.
The more the UPA Government resists, the more it confirms that the
buck does not stop with Raja. A fact acknowledged by Karunanidhi.
There is no alternative to a JPC probe. The opposition will not rest
until it is cleared. Meanwhile, since Karunanidhi has hinted that there are
more persons behind the scam, it would only be fitting that he comes
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out with the facts himself. It would save him the embarrassment of
having to be summoned before the JPC for questioning.
Intriguingly, Karunanidhi has taken exception to my demand that
Raja should be interrogated and, if warranted, arrested. “When some of
her colleagues resigned from the Union Cabinet did Jaya seek their
arrest?” he has asked in an absurd reference to me. I would like to point
out that no AIADMK member, as Union Minister, had ever presided over
a huge scam during his tenure as Union Minister, nor did any AIADMK
Union Minister have to resign under a cloud after a public outcry and
the combined insistence of a unified opposition, the entire media and
even the courts of law. Karunanidhi makes such wild and ridiculous
charges merely to divert attention from his own problems. Former DMK
minister Tha Kiruttinan was killed in broad daylight in the presence of
witnesses. A newspaper office in Madurai was burnt down and three
innocent employees were killed in full view of TV cameras. A lorry load
of Horlicks vanished into thin air near Madurai. In all these incidents, the
criminal mastermind was one and the same person from Karunanidhi’s
family, whom he has gone out of his way to protect. Otherwise,
why should all these cases still remain in the police records as unsolved?
In the case of Raja and the Spectrum scam, Karunanidhi knows that the
place of crime is Delhi and not some place in Tamil Nadu. The
complainants and witnesses cannot be coerced into turning hostile. The
case cannot be manipulated according to his whims. This sense of
helplessness is driving him into making desperate statements, for he
knows that the day of reckoning is near.

J JAYALALITHAA