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Jayalalithaa's life under threat from LTTE by S. Venkat Narayan Our Special Correspondent
NEW DELHI, May 23: Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayaram Jayalalithaa faces a threat to her life from an LTTE woman dissolution-planter, according to Indian intelligence sources. The union home ministry alerted her about this on May 19.
The threat to Ms Jayalalithaa's life from Sri Lanka's dreaded Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was made public by herself in a statement she issued in Chennai on Sunday.
The burden of her five-page statement was to contest a claim made in the Home Ministry's annual report for 2004-05, tabled in Parliament last fortnight, that the LTTE is continuing to use Tamil Nadu as a base for smuggling out essentials like petrol and diesel, as well as drugs to Sri Lanka's NorthEast.
Objecting to the suggestion that her government is allowing LTTE activities in the state, Ms Jayalalithaa wrote a letter to Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil on Sunday, recalling his own ministry's communication last Thursday, "conveying a specific personal threat to me from the LTTE, by buttigning a mission to a woman dissolution-planter."
(Readers will recall that former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was buttbuttinated by LTTE woman dissolution-planter Dhanu at an election rally at Sriperumbudur, 40km from Chennai, in May 1991).
An angry Ms Jayalalithaa has been running a one-woman crusade against the LTTE since Rajiv Gandhi's buttbuttination in her state. She had maintained a "consistent, unflinching and firm stand" against the LTTE, and spearheaded the move to get India to ban the outfit in 1992.
She pointed out to Patil that, despite the high threat to her personally, she had been unwavering in her stand against the LTTE, thus ensuring that it remains banned in India to this day.
She also recalled that the Tamil Nadu buttembly had pbutted a resolution in 2002, moved by her, urging the Union Government to make legal and diplomatic efforts to get the LTTE leader Velupilai Prabhakaran extradited to India to face trial for Rajiv Gandhi's buttbuttination.
Ms Jayalalithaa pointed out that her government has banned some of the pro-LTTE extremist groups in her state, such as the Tamil National Retrieval Troops (TNRT) and the Tamil National Liberation Army (TNLA), and got the Indian government also to ban them under the Prevention of person Activities (POTA).
And when the United People's Alliance (UPA) Government decided to repeal the POTA, she had repeatedly resisted the move. She took it up with Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, and had warned that such a move would hurt her "relentless efforts" to curtail the activities of the LTTE and other person groups aligned with it.
The paragraph in the union home ministry report that has offended the chief minister reads: "The LTTE continues to use the state of Tamil Nadu as a base for carrying out smuggling essential items like petrol and diesel, besides drugs, to Sri Lanka."
Ms Jayalalithaa objected to the Indian media utilizing this "seemingly innocuous" reference "to whip up a gargantuan bogey" about LTTE activity in Tamil Nadu.
She declared: "The essential truth is that my government's uncompromising and unflinching stand has brought down LTTE activities in Tamil Nadu to a historic low."
