Jaya rubbishes charge of political vendetta

CHENNAI: Chief Minister and AIADMK general secretary J Jayalalithaa on Friday denied Dravida MunnetraKazhagam (DMK) president M Karunanidhi’s charge that the State government was selectively targeting his partymen because of political vendetta.   “Land grab complaints were filed by people who have no political party affiliation and the police are taking action on the complaints. As such, there is no question of political vendetta,” Jayalalithaa asserted.Asked whether action would be taken against officials who had ignored land-grabbing charges during the DMK regime, the CM said no errant would be spared.“Land-grabbing cases cannot be described as vendetta politics. Complaints of land-grabbing were there even during the last five years of DMK regime. But no action was taken by the former DMK government. After this government assumed charge, the affected people began thronging the police stations and giving complaints. At present, there are over 2,000 such complaints. Police were unable to handle them, which was why I gave instructions to set up a special cell with headquarters at Chennai to deal with the complaints. We have now set up fast track courts to deal with these cases expeditiously,” Jayalalithaa said.Responding to another query, she said the Centre had not given any assurance on imposing economic sanctions against Sri Lanka although she was pressing for it. In this connection, she pointed out that a couple of days after her meeting with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the United States had stopped all aid to Sri Lanka.Asked whether the case on Uniform School Education (USE) was a setback to her government, the Chief Minister pointed out that the court had not given its verdict. “The next hearing in the case has been posted for August 2 and there is nothing more to say on this.”