Chennai: With hardly a week left for candidates to begin filing of nominations from Tamil Nadu for the May 10 Lok Sabha polls, top leaders of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK), Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK), Communist Party Marxist (CPM) and Communist Party of India (CPI) are criss-crossing the State to give a fillip to a rather lack lustre campaign.

Elections 2004-The Drama unfolds...
Political Parties in India

The AIADMK's main election plank is that only a person of Indian origin should be the Prime Minister. Party supremo Jayalalithaa, who is in the middle of her 45-day campaign, always harps on this theme and asks the people whether a "mature" Indian like A B Vajpayee or a "greenhorn" in Indian politics like Sonia Gandhi should be Prime Minister.

Jayalalithaa has already completed campaigning in 15 of the 39 Lok Sabha constituencies and the lone seat from Pondicherry.

For the DMK and other Opposition parties, the issues are the "non-performance" of the AIADMK Government in Tamil Nadu and the alleged misuse of Prevention Of Terrorism Act against political opponents in the State by the ruling AIADMK.

DMK president M Karunanidhi, in his campaigns, makes it a point to tell people that the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) had failed to respect the sentiments of Tamils, by not declaring Tamil as an official language and a classical language. "We came out of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) when our repeated pleas on this went unheeded," he tells the electorate, while asking them to reject the AIADMK-BJP combine.