2012 yearender: Jayalalithaa's water, power woes continue

Supporters of Karunanidhi's sons Alagiri and Stalin were involved in an altercation at a meeting in Madurai, prompting the 88-year-old patriarch to convene a meeting for truce.

With the sons involved in a reported race for supremacy in party ranks, Karunanidhi seemed to favour his younger son, the Chennai-based Stalin, giving some hints about succession.

There were fissures too in the seven-year-old DMDK, founded by actor Vijayakant, with four of his MLAs calling on AIADMK supremo under the pretext of taking up constituency-related issues. Members of rival parties calling on heads of opposite camps is not a common feature in the state, with Jayalalithaa expressing regret over aligning with DMDK, following a spat with the actor-politician in the Assembly.

Otherwise, buoyed by the massive win in last year's general elections, AIADMK also swept the civic polls and the subsequent bypolls, with the party chief eyeing a bigger role in national politics.

The 63 year-old-leader has made her ambition public when she asked her partymen to gift all the 40 Lok Sabha seats (39 in Tamil Nadu and one in Puducherry) to her in the next parliamentary polls. In 2004 Parliamentary polls, DMK-led alliance with Congress had bagged all the 40 seats that helped UPA-I form the government at the Centre.

Exhibiting her tough anti-Congress stand, she aligned with her Odisha counterpart Naveen Patnaik to back the NDA nominee P A Sangma for the Presidential election, but without success.

The AIADMK supremo also strongly opposed FDI in multi-brand retail contending it would badly affect the trading community who constitute a sizeable percentage in the state population. She declared she won't implement it in the state.

In order to upstage DMK and other Dravidian parties over the Lankan Tamils issue, Jayalalithaa sent back two teams of football players from the neighbouring country who had come to play friendlies while she forced the Centre to shift Sri Lankan military personnel from military bases in the state.

... contd.

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