Chief minister Nitish Kumar attends the memorial meeting for former DMK chief M Karunanidhi in Chennai on Thursday. He said the most fitting tribute to the great leader would be to implement prohibition in Tamil Nadu. Nitish also said he favoured liquor ban in the entire country as a mark of reverence to Mahatma Gandhi on the occasion of his 150th birth anniversary in 2019.

He added that it was now up to DMK chief MK Stalin to fulfil the wishes of Karunanidhi, who had wanted to implement prohibition in Tamil Nadu for social betterment.

The Bihar chief minister had flown to Chennai from New Delhi on Thursday to attend the event at which former Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda, Union road transport and highways minister Nitin Gadkari, Pondicherry chief minister Velu Narayanasami, National Conference leader Farooq Abdullah, senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad, CPI general secretary S Sudhakar Reddy, CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury, NCP leader Praful Patel, Trinamul Congress leader Derek O'Brien, JDU secretary general KC Tyagi, AAP MP Sanjay Singh and several others were present.

Nitish paid homage to Karunanidhi and hailed him as a "crusader of social justice and equality, who fought for the deprived and backward sections all his life, and whose demise on August 7 brought to an end an era of progressive work for his party as well as Tamil Nadu".

Text by Dev Raj, Telegraph picture