Although she now rules the state, she must win appeals against the convictions within six months or risk forfeiting the job.On the campaign trail that led to her party’s return to power, she was quite straightforward. “Karunanidhi criminally harassed me,” she told her supporters “I want to destroy him. Will you give me the mandate to do it?” She said that she wanted to put him in the same tiny prison cell where he had incarcerated her, and make him eat from the same plate she had used.Jaya stormed back to power with a two-thirds majority. Since she was sworn in on 14 May, at least six of her political enemies have been jailed on various charges. This weekend it was the turn of the biggest fish in the pond.But while the imperious Jaya first attained fame as a movie star, Karunanidhi is a retired screenwriter and he showed that he has not forgotten any tricks. Tipped off about his forthcoming arrest, he summoned a crew from Sun TV – the network owned by his party – and when the police arrived they filmed him being roughly carted away. Two members of his party who serve as ministers in the central government, and who live near by, were also alerted.

Murasoli Muran, the Minister of Commerce and Industry and Mr Karunanidhi’s nephew, has recently recovered from heart surgery, but both he and his cabinet colleague were also taken away, “like common criminals”, as one commentator described. They were later charged with assaulting the police.India woke up to find shocking scenes of political mayhem being played and replayed continuously on their television screens. In a village in Tamil Nadu one Karunanidhi supporter died after setting fire to himself, elsewhere in the state hundreds of demonstrators were arrested. Mr Karunanidhi’s son Stalin, who is Mayor of Madras, turned himself into the police rather than risk further violence.The central government dispatched the coalition’s “convener”, George Fernandes – who resigned as Minister of Defence in March because of a corruption scandal – to the state to find out what was going on. He reported: “No law of the land prevails in Tamil Nadu.”The leader of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, K Jana Krishnamurthi, commented: “It was only during the British Raj that citizens’ rights were given scant respect.

We did not expect a government functioning within the Constitution to behave in such a brutal manner.”Yesterday, Jaya, as composed as ever, visited the Guruvayor Sri Krishna temple to keep another promise and presented it with an elephant, in gratitude to the deity for allowing her to return to power.. Police in Okinawa have confirmed that they intend to charge an American serviceman with raping a local woman, an incident that threatens to revive bitter protests against America’s military presence on the Japanese island. Police in Okinawa have confirmed that they intend to charge an American serviceman with raping a local woman, an incident that threatens to revive bitter protests against America’s military presence on the Japanese island.
Okinawan police asked a local court for a warrant to arrest the air force sergeant after questioning him for a third day yesterday, the Japanese national broadcaster NHK reported. The man is accused of raping a Japanese woman in a public car park in the early hours of last Friday.Both the alleged rapist and the woman are in their twenties. According to Japanese media accounts, based on anonymous briefings with local police, the man claims that the woman consented to sex.She was allegedly attacked on the bonnet of a car, in the presence of a group of servicemen. At least five other air force personnel and four marines have been questioned as witnesses.

The suspect’s fingerprints were found on a car at the site of the alleged attack, the Kyodo news agency said.The town of Chatan, where the alleged rape happened, contains countless bars and nightclubs frequented by American servicemen from the nearby Kadena base, the biggest US air field in Asia and the focus of the protest movement against the military presence on Okinawa. Since the establishment of the bases after the postwar American occupation, their presence has divided the population of Japan’s smallest, poorest and most remote prefecture.On the one hand, the bases and their 26,000 personnel provide jobs and business. But they dominate the small main island, bringing pollution, land disputes and crime. Japanese in other parts of the country almost never see a soldier, American or Japanese. Seventy-five per cent of the US bases in Japan are on Okinawa, although it makes up less than one-hundredth of Japan’s land area.