Kodandaram, Vijayashanti, Others Arrested For Chalo Assembly

Pretty much nothing outside of the script happened in a mostly uneventful morning of the bid by pro-Telangana protestors (led by the Telangana Political JAC) to swarm the A P Legislative Assembly to press for their demand for separate statehood for Telangana.

Kodandaram arrested. Check. Talks about democracy being murdered. Check. Masked OU students pelt stones at police. Check. Police fire tear gas shells. Check. Activists portray police as brutal and sadistic. Check. Sundry leaders talk about how they've never seen such repression, and how CM and Congress will be taught a lesson by the people of Telangana in the next elections. Check. Ecstatic TV news channels starved for TRPs lately replay same visuals dozens of times. Check.

For those who have been tracking the Telangana agitation that received a new lease of life after YSR died in 2009 and KCR smelt blood, it was a strong sense of deja vu on Friday as swathes of the heart of the city once again ground to a halt.

Deja vu since, thankfully for the residents of Hyderabad, it's not as frequent or as bad anymore, and the last time it happened is hard to remember, compared to the bandh-a-week days of 2010.

Deja vu also since it now almost seems like a repeat telecast. Unsympathetic as that may sound, the emotions are increasingly harder to see, and it all appears like a giant made-for-TV show.

So Friday saw the usual. The police, as reported earlier, took over the arterial centres of the city in the thousands, and waited for things to begin. Students of Osmania University started pelting stones at the police for asking them not to move out of the campus for the day. The police, shackled by their masters, resorted to the provocation with tear gas shells or lesser.

The politicians did what they did best - break the law for the day, asking to be arrested. Kodandaram was held at Ashok Nagar while trying to make his way to Indira Park, and spoke about ...the usual. Vijayashanti got arrested trying to enter the Assembly despite orders. So was Swamy Goud, the head of the Telangana NGOs JAC. TRS' Nayani was arrested, too, as were several students of the OU.

All of this, however, was irrelevant to the average Hyderabadi whose main concerns were impediments to his own life and livelihood - the blockades and the crawling traffic.

Most of the central parts of Hyderabad were shut, with even bylanes turning inaccessible, and the relentless drizzle did not help (though it did appear God was pro-Telangana today, given the event could have so easily gotten washed out by the monsoon). That meant most people with work or commuting to be done a radius of 4-5km of the Assembly (or the OU campus) had to stay home. TV visuals, while barely representative of the entire city, showed curfew-like situations in several pockets of the city.

It's perhaps safe to say Kodandaram's show of strength was foiled by the cops - he was taking on the full might of the state. That, however, was of no help to the average Hyderabadi.