SASIKALA QUITS POLITICS AHEAD OF TN ELECTIONS

● Weeks ahead of Tamil Nadu polls, V.K. Sasikala, expelled AIADMK leader, said she will “stay away from politics,” but asked people to defeat DMK.

In a surprise move, V.K. Sasikala, the erstwhile confidante of J. Jayalalithaa, announced that she was retiring from politics and said that she would be praying continuously for the return of Jayalalithaa’s golden rule in the state.

Even her nephew and founder of AMMK, T.T.V. Dhinakaran was vexed. He told the media that the announcement came as a bolt from the blue.

Great expectations in some quarters of Sasikala storming the AIADMK citadel and establishing her supremacy have evaporated.

The announcement made through a typed message on a plain sheet of paper with her signature in Tamil, dated March 3, caused the raising of eyebrows for her previous statement came from her ‘camp office’ in a letterhead that had the AIADMK flag embossed boldly on the middle and identified her as the ‘general secretary.’

During a seat-sharing talk in Chennai a few days ago, the BJP gave great importance to her by putting pressure on AIADMK leaders to accommodate Dhinakaran and Sasikala in their alliance, which was vehemently resisted. The reason given by the BJP leaders was that the AIADMK votes would be split if AMMK was to stand alone.

In Wednesday night’s statement, Sasikala repeatedly urged the followers of MGR and Jayalalithaa to be united in the coming elections and defeat DMK, the common enemy identified by Jayalalithaa herself.

She did not exactly say if she was referring to the AIADMK party of the Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam (AMMK) as the one that would usher in the ‘golden rule of Amma.’