The life of former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa has been a mystery, so is her death. Though the history will record her as an iron lady in politics and will give an inevitable place in the Tamil Nadu politics that the political orbit in the state won't revolve without her. While she was celebrated by the masses across and beyond the borders, her personal life needs to be discovered. The fortress that she built had locked up her personal life to the outside world. 

The official record till date is that Jayalalithaa had a foster son, Sudhakaran and doesn't have any legal heirs due to which the Madras High Court had legally validated the leader's niece Deepa and nephew Deepak as the legal heirs for her property. While Deepa's fight against the previous government's move to make Jayalalithaa's palatial house in Chennai as her memorial is ongoing, there were some shocking events where claims of being legal heir for Jayalalithaa were made amid lacking credibility.

It's been nearly five years since Jayalalithaa had passed away and the drama of claiming the status of her legal heir has been continuing. On Thursday, when Tamil Nadu was filled with murky clouds over Diwali celebrations, there was a bolt from the blue moment where a woman from Mysore had come to Jayalalithaa's memorial and made a shocking claim that she was Jayalalithaa's daughter. Amid making such a claim, the woman had failed to divulge why she had remained silent for several years. 

According to reports, a woman named Prema had arrived at Jayalalithaa's memorial on Thursday to seek the blessings from the deceased leader. She told that she is Jayalalithaa's daughter, however, the police officers who were stationed at the memorial had refused to permit her inside the memorial. Following the denial of entry, Prema had addressed the reporters during which she said, "I came to seek blessings from my mother on Diwali but I was refused entry. My native is Mysore and I have been staying in Pallavaram and everyone knows me." 

Responding to the question of why she had remained silent for several years, Prema said, "It was due to some reasons and I'll reveal the entire details soon". She immediately left the place without responding to other questions. The latest event of claiming the status of Jayalalithaa's legal heir had got added to previous such incidents and there had been no reliable evidence or connection to establish the legal heir status of the claimants. 

Prema's claim is not the first one, here's the previous one: 

In 2017, nearly a year after Jayalalithaa's death, a 37-year-old woman, Amrutha from Bengaluru had claimed that she was the biological daughter of Jayalalithaa. She had moved to the Supreme Court and sought a DNA test to establish her maternity by exhuming the mortal remains of Jayalalithaa. In her plea, she also sought a directive from the court to permit Jayalalithaa's family to cremate her body as per the rites, rituals, and customs of Vaishnava Iyengars. Amrutha further claimed that she was raised as the daughter of Jayalalithaa's late sister Sailaja. 

She said that she came to know that she was Jayalalithaa's daughter after Sailaja's death by her relatives. However, as per the known records, Jayalalithaa has only one sibling- her elder brother Jayakumar, whose children are Deepak and Deepa. In an interview with a magazine in 2014, Sailaja had made a new claim that she was the third sibling born to Sandhya and Jayaram, with Jayalalithaa being the eldest and Jayakumar the middle child. Sailaja claimed that her mother Sadhya gave her to art director Damodar Pillai's son, who raised her. However, neither Sailaja nor Amrutha had valid proof to establish a legal connection with Jayalalithaa.

There were several contradictions in the claims made by Amrutha and Sailaja and while Amrutha had claimed in her petition that she has met Jayalalithaa a few times, Sailaja had said in her interview in 2014 that Amrutha had never met and spoken to Jayalalithaa. Sailaja then went on to claim that Jayakumar's daughter Deepa had scolded her for not attending her father's funeral. However, Deepa had affirmed that she doesn't; know Sailaja and Amrutha and added that they are fake people created by VK Sasikala's family. While Amrutha and Sailaja hadn't produced evidence to date, another woman named Prema has now come and made a new claim that she was the daughter of Jayalalithaa and that everyone knows her.