Angry Jayalalithaa not to attend CMs' June 5 conference on internal security

Alleges very little opportunity is given to chief ministers to express their views on all items on agenda

A peeved Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa on Tuesday said she would not be attending the June 5 chief ministers' conference on internal security in New Delhi.

In a strongly-worded letter to Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh, Jayalalithaa alleged that "Chief Ministers are constantly guillotined to cut short their speeches."

Indicating in her letter that she had received the invitation sent by Union Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde to attend the event, Jayalalithaa, however, said that while the Conference of Chief Ministers on Internal Security was no doubt a very important event, since it concerns the primary function of the state, namely maintenance of public order, it was essentially "an annual ritualistic exercise where very little opportunity is given to the chief ministers to express their views on all items on the agenda."

She maintained that the cavalier way in which time is alloted to chief ministers to speak, did not reflect the fact that "chief ministers of democratically elected state governments are equal partners with the Union Government in governance".

How then, she asked, could they "make meaningful contributions to the discussions".

"Under the present dispensation at the Centre, the Conferences with Chief Ministers on important issues have been reduced to a routinised ritual, rather than a consultative process, with the chief ministers being constantly guillotined to cut short their speeches," she claimed in her letter.

The Tamil Nadu chief minister further said that it is wrong on the part of the Central Government to take chief ministers for granted and to treat them casually as was apparent at the last National Development Council Meeting held on December 27, 2012. Chief ministers, she added, could not be expected to rubber stamp decisions taken at such events.

She said that Tamil Nadu's Minister for Municipal Administration, Rural Development, Law, Courts and Prisons K.P. Munusamy, the state's Home Secretary and its Director General of Police would attend the conference on her behalf.