Stage set for cop-protesters showdown

Vijayawada: The AP Assembly’s monsoon session, which is scheduled to resume on Monday after a recess, is poised to witness a police-protester showdown in the wake of Chalo Assembly call given by protagonists of Special Category Status.

The Assembly premises and arterial roads leading to the state capital are already under heavy security by armed personnel. All the entry points are heavily guarded by the gun-toting police.

Pratyeka Hoda Vibhajana Hameela Sadhana Samithi, headed by Chalasani Srinivas and K Ramakrishna of CPI and backed by all opposition parties gave a call to lay siege to the Assembly while in session, exposing the alleged failure of the TDP government to get the bifurcation-related assurances, including Special Category Status, implemented by the NDA government.

Srinivas and Ramakrishna met the city police top brass on Sunday morning with a request for permission for the protest. B V Ramana Kumar, joint commissioner of police, told The Hans India that the Assembly premises are considered a sterile zone and that no protests shall be allowed around the Assembly. Police will not allow protesters to move beyond Dharna Chowka, the officially designated place for staging protests, he said.

“Permission or no permission, we will go ahead with our agitation. A silent procession will take place from Tummalapalli Kalakshetram to the Assembly,”, Ramakrishna said at a press conference in Vijayawada on Sunday.

Even as the Samithi is mobilising protesters from all over the state in large numbers, the police launched a crackdown, in a bid to foil such attempts. Buses, trains and all modes of transport have come under police vigilance, travellers identified as agitators are getting disembarked from their vehicles at different places and detained.

According to reports reaching the state headquarters, scuffles took place between the police and protesters at Payakaraopet in Visakhapatnam district when the former disembarked them from buses. Police were scanning all trains in the Duvvada-Yalamanchili section for protesters on board. Leaders of the movement were being subjected to house-arrest at different places. The police cordoned off a gathering of CPI supporters and thwarted their attempts to reach the capital by train and huddled them into police vans in Tirupati.

In Guntur, bind-over cases were foisted against the leaders. Ramakrishna, at a media conference in Vijayawada, accused the government of using the police force to suppress the movement so as to gloss over its alleged miserable failure in realising the promise of special category status for the truncated state made by leaders from both the Congress and BJP in Parliament.

In fact, the Chalo Assembly programme was scheduled to have taken place on Monday last week. It was deferred as the Assembly adjourned the session on that particular day to facilitate a visit of MLAs and MLCs to the Polavaram project.