Jayas volley hits turf, Stalin skips jail visit

TIRUCHY: Amid protests and self-immolation bids demanding the revocation of the death penalty awarded to three men in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, DMK treasurer M K Stalin on Monday skipped his visit to the Central Prison here.Ahead of the former deputy chief minister’s scheduled visit at 2.30 pm, former ministers K K S S R Ramachandran and N Selvaraj, along with former MLAs and party functionaries, began arriving on the premises of the prison from 2 pm.Media persons had also gathered in good numbers hoping to get Stalin’s reaction to Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa’s statement faulting her predecessor, M Karunanidhi, for advising the then Governor to reject the mercy petitions of the three Rajiv Gandhi case convicts.Around 3.15 pm, however, party functionaries informed the media that Stalin had cancelled his visit, without giving specific reasons for it. Later, it was revealed that Stalin was actually staying put at a hotel in the city.Stalin’s decision has raised eyebrows, as he has not avoided the media before.  According to reports from Cuddalore, Stalin had attributed the DMK government’s decision to reject the mercy petitions to the “circumstances at that time”.  Among the political circles, though, the rumour doing the rounds is that the DMK leader avoided the media as he finds himself between a rock and a hard place for his party’s flip-flop over the issue — recommending a death sentence when in power and demanding its revocation after being unseated.Moreover, Stalin’s remarks at Cuddalore, which were telecast in TV channels, are seen as an open admission of the DMK’s lip service on the issue. Any poser by the media would have embarrassed him, as he can neither deny what he had said in Cuddalore nor explain the party’s contradictory stand.Jayalalithaa has already ripped off Karunanidhi’s image on the Tamils issue and discredited his claims of being the saviour of Tamils through an Assembly resolution calling for the declaration of Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa as a war criminal. The CM’s statement and a reaction by Stalin would only serve as another blow to Karunanidhi.