Chennai, Feb 14 – V.K. Sasikala has been found guilty of corruption by the Supreme Court and will have to surrender to the police in Chennai so that she can be jailed for four years.
This ends her high-decibel and divisive bid to be Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu – she is now barred from contesting an election for the next ten years, the NDTV reported.
At 10:30 am, two judges of the Supreme Court delivered their ruling separately, but agreed that Sasikala had, in the early 90s, accumulated an illicit fortune.
The case was originally pivoted on J Jayalalithaa, the four-term Chief Minister who Sasikala lived with, but because she died in December, the judgement does not detail her role. However, the finding rips a huge role through the legacy of Jayalalithaa, beloved “Amma” to lakhs of supporters who accorded her deity-like status and treated her with religious fervor.
The case was premised on the fact that during her first term, Jayalalithaa misused her office to accrue 60 cores of assets in a shared fortune with Sasikala and her male relatives, who were later disowned by Amma.
In 2014, both women were jailed in Bengaluru, where the case was first tried. After being acquitted by the highest court in Karnataka, Jayalalithaa returned to office. The appeal against the acquittal was filed in the Supreme Court by the Karnataka government, which has prosecuted the case.
As the verdict was delivered, Sasikaka was at a resort on the outskirts of Chennai, where about 120 legislators from her party, the ruling AIADMK, have been stationed for a week to prevent them from switching allegiance to her rival, O Panneerselvam, who took over as Chief Minister after the death of Jayalalithaa, who was his mentor.
OPS, as he is known, had refused party orders to facilitate the promotion of Sasikala to the state’s top job. Instead, like her, he petitioned Governor C Vidyasagar Rao for the right to take a trust vote in the legislature to prove he is the rightful head of government.
To win, 117 votes are needed.
Sasikala’s faction, which has about 125 of the party’s 134 MLAs, will now have to elect a new leader who will approach the Governor with a new request for the opportunity to prove his or her majority.
Panneerselvam now has nine state lawmakers and 12 parliamentarians backing him. They assert that because he was chosen three times by Amma to stand-in for her as Chief Minister when she was forced to take a breather on corruption charges, he was her intended replacement.
Sasikala has never contested any election – not even one within her party – and her clamour for Chief Minister had driven public outrage against her proposed promotion, with social media campaigns and celebrities deriding her for trying to use sheer force – a reference again to the sequestering of MLAs – to fulfil her political ambition.
