Jaya: Surprise move

Chennai, June 13: ADMK chief Jayalalithaa sprang yet another surprise today by rehabilitating T.T.V. Dinakaran, the nephew of friend Sassikala, precisely a month after his defeat in the Lok Sabha polls.

Dinakaran figures on the top of the list of four party nominees for the Rajya Sabha polls from the state. Nominations for the polls to the Upper House close on June 17 and the elections, if necessary, will be held on June 28.

Forty-year-old Dinakaran, the ADMK’s organising secretary who represented Periyakulam in the 13th Lok Sabha, was defeated in last month’s elections from the Thevar-stronghold of southern Tamil Nadu by Haroon Rashid of the Congress.

Dinakaran faces charges of foreign exchange regulation violation and is a co-accused in the disproportionate assets case against the Tamil Nadu chief minister, which was recently transferred by the Supreme Court to a special court in Bangalore. However, he is set to emerge the ADMK’s most visible face in New Delhi.

Two other ADMK candidates who lost the Lok Sabha elections — S. Anbazhagan, who was defeated at Rasipuram by Rani of the Congress and N.R. Govindarajar who lost in Gobichettipalayam to former state Congress president E.V.K.S. Elangovan — have now been nominated to contest the Rajya Sabha elections.

Jayalalithaa has also nominated K. Malaichamy, who had retired as state home secretary to contest in the recent elections. However, Malaichamy — a Thevar — was denied a Lok Sabha ticket in the recent elections.

As each party candidate would require at least 34 first-preference votes, the ADMK with 142 MLAs, should not face much difficulty in getting its four nominees elected on its own.

The DMK, which has 30 MLAs, has already agreed to support a PMK nominee for one of the two remaining Rajya Sabha seats from the state. Union health minister Anbumani Ramadoss, the son of PMK leader S. Ramadoss, is likely to be the PMK candidate, as the 35-year-old did not contest the Lok Sabha polls.

The DMK is likely to back the Congress in the sixth seat. Former Union minister Jayanthi Natarajan, who is close to Congress president Sonia Gandhi, is the front-runner for that seat.

Ahead of the polls to the Upper House, the DMK has patched up with the Dravidar Kazhagam, after years of blowing hot and cold with the party from which it had broken away under C.N. Annadurai’s leadership in 1949.

DMK chief M. Karunanidhi shared a platform last evening with K. Veeramani, the general secretary of the Dravidar Kazhagam, to celebrate the centenary of Singapore-based Tamil scholar K. Sarangapani. He declared that the two parties, whose ties are akin to a “mother-son relationship”, should pledge to work together for the welfare of Tamils.

“Politics is one thing, but to redeem a slave society (Tamils) and take it to greater heights is quite another and we should work united in fulfilling this task,” Karunanidhi said, after Veeramani had remarked that the “threat” to the Tamil culture from religious fundamentalists should be resisted.