TAMIL NADU-A Southern Waterloo

TAMIL NADU A Southern Waterloo THESE are exciting clays in Tamil Nadu. The local papers are making merry, half of them for tweedledum and the other half for tweedledee. The M G Ramachandran-Karunanidhi confrontation was long expected and it is probably in the fitness of things that the vampire from Delhi, as Fernandes called her in Madras, was the first to draw blood and set the two on a collision course from which neither can back out now, It all started with her arrest. Tamil Nadu witnessed 'spontaneous' demonstrations by the Congress-CPI combine with a sympathetic government machinery looking on. From all accounts, the AIADMK government proved to be as sympathetic to these demonstrations as the Maharashtra government. The sudden shock of the event and the bungling by the Janata at the Centre caught the two warring sides in Tamil Nadu temporarily off balance. Only until the day before, there had been a rising Crescendo of threatening utterances by MGR's minions that Karuna- nidhi was to be arrested any day with equally blood-curdling challenges from the other side; let them do it and see.