V.K. Sasikala, former interim general secretary of the AIADMK, has set up a war room at her home in T. Nagar here and is calling the party cadres and middle-level functionaries with 20-30 calls per day.

Sasikala, who was a close aide of late Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa, is using her contacts across the state and is carefully choosing the cadres she should address and is mainly concentrating on the turfs of AIADMK leaders Edappadi K. Palaniswami and O. Panneerselvam.

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Sasikala’s sister-in-law Ilavarasi, her personal assistant Karthikeyan and four assistants manage the war room at her residence which has high-tech digital facilities, and proper data of the lower and medium-level functionaries of the party.

Sources in Sasikala’s team told IANS that she is abreast of all the English, Tamil newspapers as also several YouTube channels which are focusing on developments in Tamil Nadu politics.

She is receiving 50 to 80 letters a day from AIADMK and AMMK cadres who are disgruntled at the leadership of the functioning of their party leaders, they claimed. The war room was instrumental in releasing recorded audiotapes of her conversation with the AIADMK functionaries to the media.

Karthikeyan is the key person who puts her through to the AIADMK cadres and he connects her to these leaders only after a thorough background check. The Sasikala team is planning meticulously to discredit EPS and OPS regularly and sources indicated that she was using different languages to different functionaries. To some people she evokes the name of MGR, to some she uses the name of Jayalalithaa, and to some leaders, she speaks ill of both Palaniswami and Panneerselvam.

She released a tape that she would have made Panneerselvam the Chief Minister was a meticulously planned telephone call to create a wedge between the two leaders.

The war room members claimed that Sasikala is getting several calls from disgruntled AIADMK cadres from across the state to take over the reins of the party but she is waiting for an opportune moment for the same.

The callers, according to her aides are mostly from Tiruppur and Namakkal which are the strongholds of former Chief Minister Palaniswami.