CHENNAI, JULY 25: The stalemate in talks between the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) and the Congress over identification of seats for the Lok Sabha elections will end only with the intervention of the All India Congress Committee (AICC), Tamil Nadu Congress Committee (TNCC) sources said today. The TNCC did not resume its dialogue with the AIADMK election committee today.According to sources, the differences between the two parties ran so deep that AIADMK general secretary J Jayalalitha and Congress president Sonia Gandhi might have to intervene and sort out the contentious issues over sharing the constituencies.The talks were stalled yesterday when it was known that one member of the TNCC committee, authorised by the AICC to negotiate with the AIADMK, met member K A Sengottaiyan at his residence with a list that substantially differed from that tentatively approved by the AICC. The list was presented by PCC president Tindivanam K Ramamurthy.The two parties are learnt to have agreedonly on five out of the 12 seats allotted to the Congress in the seat-sharing arrangement.The identification process in fact started when Sonia Gandhi's emissaries Manmohan Singh and A K Antony were in Chennai for their third round of talks. Sengottaiyan met Singh at his hotel room and arrived at a broad framework for identifying the Congress seats. If Sonia Gandhi and Jayalalitha would not confer again to iron out the differences, the only alternative for the AICC would be to send its observer to Chennai to complete the process, sources said. The observer could turn out to be R K Dhawan, the general secretary in charge of Tamil Nadu affairs. Another way of achieving some progress in the dialogue would be by reconstituting the three-member committee that held talks with the AIADMK. The committee members are former TNCC president K V Thangabalu and vice-president S Singaravadivelu, besides Ramamurthy.
