“They do not get any issue. So, they have found Rama (the ‘Ramar Sethu’ controversy)”
CHENNAI: The objective of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam is to ensure that the Sethusamudram project is not completed before the general elections that may take place in 2008 or 2009, M. Karunanidhi, Chief Minister and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam president, said on Wednesday.
“They do not get any issue. So, they have found Rama (meaning the “Ramar Sethu” controversy),” the Chief Minister said in a statement.
Tracing the history of the project, he said the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) had concluded that the sixth alignment on the “Adam’s Bridge” was the best as it had found. It would be economical and not cause any environmental harm.
He explained how legal battles were fought on the project in the last three years.
He pointed out that the “Ramar Sethu” factor did not come up when Jayalalithaa as the Chief Minister, wrote in August 1991 to the then Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, a “theist and devotee of Rama”, urging him to include the project in the Eighth Plan.
In his reply to Ms Jayalalithaa, Rao too expressed his keen interest in the project but did not state that it should not be taken up in view of the “Ramar Sethu.”
Mr. Karunanidhi recalled that when he was the Chief Minister in 1989, he had written to the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi on the need for implementing the project.
Printer friendly
page Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
