Air travel due to security risk: Jayalalitha

Madurai: AIADMK supremo and chief minister Jayalalithaa on Friday said that threat to her life forced her to prefer air travel for election campaign. She  also opted for this mode of transport due to paucity of time and to lessen the burden of police force.

Reacting to senior Congress leader and finance minister P. Chidambaram’s criticism, Ms Jayalalithaa said he was very much aware of the threat she has been facing as he himself during his tenure as Union home minister had written a letter to her in this regard. “Mr Chidambaram should look back over the contents of the letter he wrote to me on March 27, 2009, about the threat to my life and my reply to it. He should stop talking as he likes,” the AIADMK general secretary said at a poll rally in Madurai.

Referring to Ms Jayalalithaa’s travel by chopper to election meeting venues, Chidambaram had criticised her by saying that those who fly through the sky would not be in the know of the happenings on the earth.

Recalling his criticism, she said that she had been touring across TN and meeting people since 1982 and there was no hamlet in the state where she had not been. She had campaigned extensively for months during every LS and assembly polls after 1984. “In fact, I have even campaigned for Mr Chidambaram asking people to vote for him when he followed me in an open jeep,” she said with a smile in her face.

The chief minister, who is left with no choice but to carry the entire burden of poll campaign of her party on her shoulders, said she had taken to air travel considering the time factor to cover all constituencies and the work load it would bring upon the police if she chose to go by road.

To his claims that she was speaking against truth about his lack of contributions to Tamil Nadu in general and Sivagangai constituency in particular, she asked him to list them if there were any.

“Does he not have any role in ruining the Indian economy? Isn’t there any truth in the Congress-led Central government failing to sanction '901 crore for two education-related schemes and '931 crore for road maintenance works for Tamil Nadu? Did not he cut the budgeted allocations in the revised estimates?” she asked..

Ms Jayalalithaa also slammed Chidambaram for not extending the several provisions and facilities available for entrepreneurial aspirants in some parts of the country to the industrially backward southern Tamil Nadu.