Maran steals the show

By Our Special Correspondent

CHENNAI, JULY 30. Having been at the centre of the DMK's crisis- management in both Chennai and New Delhi after the arrest of its leader Mr. M. Karunanidhi, senior DMK leader and Union Industries Minister, Mr. Murasoli Maran, stole the show at the party's general council meeting here yesterday.

Mr. Maran was roundly applauded as he came up to the dais to give his analysis of the developments. The arrest and subsequent events, he said, had occasioned a ``groundswell of public sympathy'' for Mr. Karunanidhi, who had `sweated it out' for over 50 years in public life and had been Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu four times.

``Even the CPI and the CPI(M) could not ignore this, which spoke volumes of the inhuman treatment meted out to our leader'', Mr. Maran thundered, even while explaining why the Article 356 could not be invoked against the AIADMK regime now to ``rectify'' the situation.

But the DMK has always consistently opposed the Article 356, he said. If not for the former West Bengal Chief Minister, Mr. Jyothi Basu's resistance at the Inter-State council meeting, Article 356 would have been out of the Statute book by now, he said.

The DMK could take credit even for the Supreme Court verdict in the Bommai case, which had ``now kept Article 356 under lock and key'', said Mr. Maran, to rebuff the party's critics on DMK reversing its stand on this issue in seeking the dismissal of the AIADMK Government. ``We should therefore think of other ways of countering the AIADMK's repressive rule'', added Mr. Maran.

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