Updated by admin on
Saturday, September 27, 2014 11:17 PM IST
Chennai:
AIADMK supremo J Jayalalithaa has asked her party ministers and MLAs to get back to Chennai and elect a new chief minister (name kept secret) on Sunday, September 28, 2014, so as to complete the mandatory exercise of installing a new CM in her place. The ministers and MLAs were waiting outside the Bengaluru central prison to get a sense of how to proceed since she has been convicted and jailed.
The name will be conveyed to the MLAs at a meeting of the AIADMK legislature party on Sunday, where the new leader will be elected unopposed, and thereafter a meeting with the Governor will take place for the installation of the new CM.
The meeting will, no doubt, adopt a resolution hailing Jayalalithaa's stewardship of the party and the State and express the hope that she would return soon, and get her name cleared, and resume the post of CM. The installation of the new CM would also be immediate so as not to allow a vacuum which could hurt the ruling party's image and leave scope for mischief. Also, the Union Home ministry is understood to have communicated to the state governor to take steps for a new CM to take over immediately in view of the bad law and order situation.
The BJP government led by Modi would like to lend a helping hand to Jayalalithaa at this moment of crisis but is helpless since the special court has taken a firm stand and left no scope for a compromise. The BJP government at the Centre and the AIADMK government in Tamil Nadu also have only a limited scope to find away out of this legal tangle as Karnataka is ruled by the Congress and will not allow any arm-twisting or under-the-table compromises.
For instance, Jayalalithaa will have to seek bail only from the high court in Bengaluru and not from Tamil Nadu. As such, the high court is on vacation owing to Dussehra holidays, and it will be at least a week before the court resumes normal work.
Narendra Modi has avoided making any comments on the case or the conviction, though he is normally quick to shoot his mouth off or use the twitter against political adversaries. In this case, Jaya is his good friend, and he obviously wants to help her. Union Home minister Rajnath Singh too has avoided comments while the state BJP chief Tamizhisai Sounderarajan has made sympathetic noises.
Jayalalithaa, after all, is not a Congress chief minister, and the BJP has different views on corruption in different states. It was not too long ago that it tried to protect its chief minister B S yeddyurappa from corruption charges but the Karnataka Lok Ayukta put its foot down and ensured
an adverse verdict against him. Very reluctantly, the BJP high command asked BSY to step down.
Although he was shown the door by the party, one of the first things Modi did, after being announced as the party's PM candidate, was to bring back BSY and tainted B Sriramulu to the party fold, overruling Sushma Swaraj's objections.
So, for the AIADMK, it's back to the OPS days -- O Pannerselvam looked after the job of CM in Jayalaithaa's temporary absence in 2001. The new CM will know that he or she has to keep the seat warm for Jaya. The only question is how long will be the wait.
