Chennai, Dec 31:

Slamming the Congress and BJP in Karnataka for being “determined” in denying Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu, AIADMK chief Jayalalithaa today said her party would go it alone in the next Lok Sabha polls and secure all 40 seats in order to assert its rights in Delhi.  

Both parties were “united” and “determined” not to give Tamil Nadu its due share of water from Cauvery river, a combative Jayalalithaa said in her address to partymen at the AIADMK general council near here.

“To ensure Tamil Nadu’s rights and prevent (Cauvery) delta regions from turning into a desert, we have to independently fight the coming Lok Sabha polls and win all 40 seats” (39 in Tamil Nadu and one in Puducherry), the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister said, virtually sounding the election bugle.

“We have to work out our path. We can’t be dependent on anyone as such a situation has been created. Some parties may have to depend on national parties like BJP or Congress which lead respective coalitions, but that depends on their situation,” she said in an apparent reference to her main rival, the DMK.

But her party was in a situation where it cannot depend on anyone. “We have to decide our future, chalk out our path.  We cannot depend on BJP or Congress,” she said in an impassioned appeal, observing she had all along in her life taken decisions for herself and not depended on others.  She neither had a family to fall back on and this was not out of choice but it was her “fate,” she said.  

Hitting out at the Congress and BJP, she recalled that Congress leaders SM Krishna and M Veerappa Moily had accompanied the Karnataka BJP Chief Minister Jagadish Shettar to impress upon the Prime Minister on Karnataka’s reluctance to release water.

Taking a dig at the DMK on the issue, Jayalalithaa said “it is learnt that DMK MPs had during their meeting with the Prime Minister sought not to notify the final award of the Cauvery tribunal,” reiterating her earlier similar remarks made in this matter.