Karunanidhi Has Sympathisers In Uf

A day after DMK leader M Karunanidhi threatened to pull his four ministers out of the I K Gujral government, there was a realisation among Front partners that the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister actually had good reasons to support his outburst.

Besides the DMK, other important partners of the Front also feel that a small section in the Front led by former Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda was using the Laloo Prasad issue to create division and chaos in the Front.

It is nobodys case in the United Front to give membership to Laloo Prasad and his RJD. What Front leaders, including Karunanidhi, have been saying is that if Laloo Prasad was willing to offer an unconditional support to the Gujral government, there was no reason to say no to it, a source close to a senior Front partner said yesterday.

He said Deve Gowda and CPI(M) general secretary Harkishen Singh Surjeet were unnecessarily going about repeating that they would oppose the inclusion of the RJD into the Front as they were committed to fight corruption. This kind of repeated assertion gives an impression that there were forces in the Front who wanted to admit Laloo Prasads RJD into the Front even if the Bihar Chief Minister refused to quit in the wake of him being charged in the animal husbandry scam.

In fact, almost every partner of the United Front has made its stand clear that they stood for chargesheeted leaders to resign immediately from public positions. As far as the continuation of the three Laloo Prasad supporters in the Gujral government was concerned, the decision was left to the steering committee.

Though no Front representative is willing to go on record to identify those who they thought were trying to use Laloos shoulder to fire the gun on the Gujral government, off the record they blame Gowda, his confidante and Union civil aviation minister CM Ibrahim, railway minister Ram Vilas Paswan, and to some extent newly elected Janata Dal president Sharad Yadav, food minister in Gowda government D P Yadav as those behind creating chaos in the United Front.

These leaders do not so much blame the Left parties but are extremely unhappy at the way Surjeet was playing to the tunes of this group.

Karunanidhi may have been the one to air strong feelings first, but there are indications that senior leaders belonging to the TMC, TDP, Prime Minister himself and his colleagues in the Janata Dal fully agree with his views. Southern parties were already assessing the pros and cons of sharing power with the Congress on Monday.

As far as the attitude to Laloo Prasad and his RJD is concerned, the regional parties were of the view that by repeated unneccesary statements that RJD would not be included in the Front, Prasad would be pushed to a corner and become even more rigid. On the other hand, if Front leaders tried to put pressure on Prasad to resign as Chief Minister and in return give membership for his RJD of the Front, he might be persuaded to quit.

The regional parties feel that if Laloo Prasad was pushed to the corner he would be isolated from the Front.

At the same time the Front would not be in a position to win and form a government, which literally means handing over the state to the BJP.