As announced, students across the twin cities boycotted classes on
January 15. They headed to the Nizam College grounds for a meeting. Two
groups emerged among the students: one group demanded protections for
Telangana whereas another group demanded a separate state for Telangana.
During the debate, the group demanding a separate Telangana state clearly
had an upper hand. After the meeting was over, President of the Osmania
University Students Association Mallikarjun led a student rally from the
Nizam college grounds to the Abids Circle. Despite heavy police security,
there were stray incidents of students throwing stones at city buses.
Student Ravindranath who lit the Telangana forest fire in Khammam
was still on fast, and his health continued to deteriorate. In solidarity, students
intensified their protests. Kodada is a Nizam Telangana town on the Coastal
Andhra border. Agitators stopped the buses going from Kodada to the Kosta
districts, stranding 500 passengers.
As days passed, the student movement gradually turned violent. Two
student groups, one demanding a separate state, another demanding special
protection for the region, staged rallies in the city. Students blocked the gates
of the Secretariat for 90 minutes. In Khammam, students resorted to throwing
stones and damaged many Road Transportation Corporation (R.T.C.) buses.
They also attacked the telephone and telegraph offices and destroyed the
communication infrastructure. Because of the violence, the R.T.C halted bus
services between the Telangana and Andhra regions.
CM Sri Kasu Brahmananda Reddy urged people not to be misled
by the separatist slogans. He said that, with the limited resources it has, the
government was doing everything in its power to develop backward regions of
the state. He reminded people that, out of 165 villages electrified in the state,
85 of them were in Mahaboob Nagar alone.
The Employee Union leaders concerned with politicians dragging their
issues into the controversy signed a statement requesting their members not
to act in a way that hurts the cordial relations existing among employees. They
also stated that in the Telangana protections debate, it was unfortunate that the
issues of state employees came up. They stated that the employee union needed to
address these things. The A.P. Non-Gazetted Officers (N.G.O.) Union President
Sri A. Sriramulu, Telangana N.G.O. Union President Sri K. R. Amos, Secretariat
Employees Association President Sri P. Satya Moorthi, and the Teachers Union
President Sri Rama Brahmam and others signed this statement.
During the early part of the separate state movement, government
employees resented politicians and students using their issues. However, that
changed quickly. Amos, a main signatory of the Employee Union resolution,
who urged employees not to get involved in separate state politics, became a
firebrand leader of the separate Telangana movement.
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