Hyderabad, June 20: Several areas in Hyderabad including upmarket localities like Banjara Hills, Jubilee Hills and Madhapur were converted into huge open air community kitchens on Sunday when thousands of Telangana activists responded to the call given by the Joint Action Committee (JAC) to cook and eat on the streets to draw the attention of the federal government to demand for a separate state.
The family of K Chandrasekhar Rao, president of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi spearheading the separate statehood movement, was out in full strength in different areas. While KCR, his wife and daughter Kavitha participated in the open air cooking show in Jubilee Hills, his son K T Rama Rao, wife and children participated in similar demonstration in Banjara Hills. KCR’s nephew and lawmaker Harish Rao and his wife led the kitchen brigade in front of Hitec City, where they were joined by techies with T-shirts displaying slogans like “We are from IT, we are for T.”
The demonstrations began in the morning with the preparation of breakfast, and then the women including the wives of political leaders were seen busy cutting vegetables and getting things ready for lunch. The fare, though not elaborate, included Hyderabadi delicacies like chicken biryani, chicken masala and mutton qorma. The protesters set up kitchens on the main roads and important junctions in the city, causing inconvenience to the people. The situation would have been much worse had it not been a Sunday.
The police, on their part, had made elaborate arrangements including mobilisation of additional forces to tackle the protest and ensure that no untoward incidents take place even as the organisers warned the government against creating any hurdles in the ‘peaceful protest’. JAC leaders said they chose Sunday so that all sections of people could participate in the protest, expecting at least 100,000 kitchens to come up across the city and on the outskirts, and a turnout of 1.5 million protestors.
Meanwhile, KCR, addressing people at the protest site, said their demand to carve out a separate state of Telangana would be met only if the Congress lawmakers from the region put in their papers. “I can assure all the Congress MPs and MLAs that I will personally ensure a thumping win for them when elections are held if they resign. They need not have any apprehensions about their political future,” he said.
JAC chairman Prof Kodandaram, who participated in the kitchen protest along with his family members in the volatile Osmania University campus, said this was the perfect way of sending a message to the centre on their demand since cooking and eating out under the shade of trees on a leisurely day was a tradition among Telangana families. This is not the first that the JAC has resorted to a unique form of protest. Earlier, it had given a call to the people of the region to go through their daily chores out in the open to which people responded by not only cooking and eating on the streets but also having a bath and shave and even having an afternoon siesta out in the open.
-Agencies