The student agitation for a separate Telangana escalated today with Osmania University students clashing with the police several times during the day, leaving Hyderabad tense. The unbridled fury and tactics of protest and demonstrations apart from the multiple attacks on fully armed policemen showed shades of Naxalite influence.
With TRS president K Chandrasekhara Rao?s health becoming the primary concern for the TRS rather than the demand for a separate state, the agitation has entirely passed into the hands of the students who are showing no restraint and attacking anything that moves.
KCR?s son KT Rama Rao asked the protestors not to resort to violence. ?If any untoward incident occurs either on the students? side or to anyone else, this entire agitation would lose it meaning. Please show restraint and do not take to violence,?? he appealed with folded hands outside the Nizam?s Institute of Medical Sciences (NIMS) where KCR is admitted but still on fast.
Several police officials who were supervising security at the OU suggested that the deployment of students on various fronts that tested the strength of the police indicated that the students were not acting entirely on their own. ?Someone is controlling them, directing them every hour on what to do at every turn. There is a suspicion that some of the student leaders are influenced by Left ideology and the Naxalites and they are directing the students to violent behaviour,?? an official said.
On the morning of the second day of the bandh, Rapid Action Force personnel and policemen who were guarding the perimeter of the Osmania University campus came under a rain of stones as hundreds of students targeted them. Several policemen were injured, triggering a lathi-charge in which some media personnel were also injured. The issue immediately figured in the Assembly which began on a stormy note today with TRS MLAs demanding that the government table a Bill on Telangana. TRS workers torched two state road transport buses and damaged several vehicles near Ameerpet.
Meanwhile, normal life was crippled in the Telangana region on the second day of the bandh. Commuters, professionals and patients arriving in Hyderabad from the neighbouring districts bore the brunt.