Apollo hospital is new headquarters of AIADMK supporters

CHENNAI: A bunch of AIADMK supporters sat all day outside Chennai's Apollo hospital where chief minister J Jayalalithaa is being treated after she was admitted last Thursday. The hospital had said she was being treated for fever and dehydration. Days after that, as the supporters await news; the state bureaucracy is functioning `as usual' with instructions said to be coming from the hospital.

“The chief minister is in very good health and we are confident that she will come out of the hospital hale and healthy,“ said AIADMK spokesperson CR Saraswati who was waiting outside the hospital with party supporters.

As party supporters continued to make offerings in temples and perform special prayers for the chief minister's speedy recovery, sources said top officials were either meeting the chief minister inside the hospital or getting instructions from her on state issues that demanded immediate attention.

“The chief minister is discharging all her official duties from the hospital. On Tuesday, she met officials on the Cauvery water issue and on Wednesday other officials met her at the hospital to get her instructions. She is doing very well and we are waiting outside because we do not want to go and disturb her,“ Saraswati added. Chief minister J Jayala lithaa has on occasions in the recent past handled governance from outside her office. In September 2014, when Jayalalithaa was incarcerated in Bengaluru briefly after a special court judgement convicted her in the disproportionate assets case and for days after that when she was confined to her Poes Garden residence, officials and her political lieutenants would meet her at her place for advice and instructions. And currently, as there is no official word on when she will be discharged from the hospital, a senior bureaucrat, who did not wish to be identified, told ET that work was happening `as usual' at the state secretariat.

“This is not new to Tamil Nadu, a state were at least three former chief ministers including CN Annadurai, MG Ra machandran and M Karuna nidhi have ensured that the state functioned normally when they were hospitalised,“ says N Sathiya Moorthy, director, Chennai of the Observer Research Foundation.

“Some senior ministers in their respective governments were given extra elbow room to take key decisions even when they were undergoing treatment,“ Moorthy said. Although Jayalalithaa's style of functioning is known to be markedly different from her predecessors, experts point out that an indication of some change in her style could be seen as she deputed the PWD minister to represent the state to hold talks with Karnataka counterparts on the Cauvery issue on Friday.

However, with very less information coming out on the exact health condition of the chief minister and not even a picture of her holding meetings with top officials being released by the department of information and public relations, experts also point out that any observation on the way the government is being run from the hospital may tend to be speculative in nature.