“Karunanidhi reinforcing rich-poor divide”

Jayalalithaa

AIADMK general secretary Jayalalithaa on Tuesday charged Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi with not expressing concern for the poor and the downtrodden.

In a statement here, she said the Chief Minister had remarked at a function on New Year's Day that freebies would continue in the State as long as the poor remained.

By making this assertion, he was not expressing his concern for the poor and the downtrodden; on the contrary he was only publicly reinforcing the rich-poor divide.

He was admitting that he had no scheme to eradicate poverty.

Giving away freebies arbitrarily without strengthening the basic infrastructure was like printing currency notes without a corresponding gold back up, Ms. Jayalalithaa said. The cost of vegetables and LPG cylinder had gone up considerably. Similarly, farmers who had been promised free power faced power cuts. Though the colour television sets were being distributed freely, cable connection was expensive.

One by one, the rights of Tamil people were bartered away by the State government.

In the Krishna River water sharing dispute, Tamil Nadu's share alone remained at a “miserable 15 tmc ft,” while those of other States had gone up substantially.

In the Mullaperiyar dam issue too, the Kerala government was set to build a new dam and make the present dam dysfunctional.