TRS Stifling Democracy: Telangana Congress

The TRS government, while chanting the "Bangaru Telangana" slogan, was in reality suppressing the voices of its critics and throttling freedom of expression in the State, the Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee said.

Speaking to the media at Gandhi Bhavan on Wednesday, TPCC vice-president Mallu Ravi and general secretary Mahesh Kumar Goud alleged that the TRS government was keeping its critics and intellectuals in jail, thereby ruining democratic values.

They said that though civil liberties leaders Prof. Haragopal and Virasam's Varavara Rao had participated in the Telangana movement vigorously, the TRS government had detained them in Bhongir on the pretext that they would speak in favor of Naxalites at the meeting held in Warangal.

The TPCC leaders demanded that CM K Chandrashekar Rao, who had told the people before the elections that his agenda was the same as that of the Naxalites, explain why he had detained Prof. Haragopal and Varavara Rao. The Telangana Democratic Front had organized the meeting with the intervention of the High Court, they pointed out.

They further claimed that the government was hatching a conspiracy to suppress movements in Osmania University, which had played a key role in achieving Telangana, by installing CC cameras and deploying police men in plain clothes in the university. The government had installed CC cameras worth Rs. 9 crores on the university campus and was using policemen in mufti for continuous surveillance only to suppress opposition from the people, they alleged.