The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : No one else can claim credit: Jayalalithaa

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Sep 09, 2004

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

No one else can claim credit: Jayalalithaa

By Our Special Correspondent

CHENNAI, SEPT. 8. The Chief Minister, Jayalalithaa, today sought to debunk the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam general secretary, Vaiko's claim that the Sethusamudram project was initiated due to his efforts.

In a statement here, she said: "At various points of time, practically all the political leaders of Tamil Nadu and all the Chief Ministers have made the demand for implementing the Sethusamudram project." Both she and former Chief Minister, M.G. Ramachandran, had made this demand. "Thiru Vaiko's childish attempt to claim credit for something he has never done is thus most amusing."

Insisting that she was instrumental in getting the project included in the National Agenda for Governance of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Government after the 1998 Lok Sabha election, Ms. Jayalalithaa said the Centre announced at that time that it would be taken up.

"This project on which the focus was placed for the first time on my insistence has today come to the Detailed Project Report stage. Thus if the question is raised as to whom the Sethusamudram project owes its development, it is hundred per cent due to my efforts at that most critical juncture," she said. If anyone could claim credit for the project, "it is only I and no one else."

It was "pathetic, comical and absurd" of Mr. Vaiko to make the "tall claim" that the project was initiated due to his efforts, she said.

Congress claim

Already, the MDMK and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam started a poster war claiming credit for the project. And the Congress joined the claim game today, with its own posters, thanking the party president, Sonia Gandhi, and the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, for clearing the Rs. 2000-crore project.

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