Hyderabad, April 11: In an atmosphere fraught with emotion, victims of police immoderation narrated painful ordeals they endured during the recent Telangana agitation in Osmania University. Most continue to be haunted to this day.
“For the first time I saw how police themselves hurled stones. We kept telling them we were female students and unarmed,” said a Master’s student Mani, victim of police violence on the campus. To avoid mistaken identity, she and friends even walked under streetlights, yet the stones kept coming.
“It was only after we repeatedly begged them that they finally stopped,” she told a panel of jury members conducting a public hearing into police violence in Osmania University from November 29, 2009 to March 9, on Saturday. Eventually, Mani and some of her friends were injured when they tried rescuing students from B Hostel in the campus. “They beat us up mercilessly and then foisted different cases on us… This is undemocratic.”
It is the filing of cases that has become more of a bother for students as well as residents of nearby Manikeswar Nagar. Police booked, according to one estimate, as many as 500 cases and even arrested some students in their native villages.
“I was pulled out from a barber’s shop in Aleru,” said Upendra, a research scholar. He recounted how he was earlier arrested at a secluded spot in Chilkalguda, when 12 policemen on six two-wheelers accosted him and produced him before a magistrate at late hours before being driven to Afzalgunj police station around midnight.
It was the tear-choked deposition of Andalamma that moved everyone, the jury included. Her son was mercilessly beaten up by 20 policemen who stormed into a house in Manikeswar Nagar. “Today he is suffering from serious injuries and is unable to work for two months. I am having a tough time managing the household,” she said.
Lawyers and journalists too deposed before the jury that consisted of distinguished public intellectuals such as G. Haragopal, D. Narasimha Reddy, MV Shastri, Kalpana Kannabiran, Deeptha Achar, Susie Tharu and Krishnadeva Rao.
“There were deliberate attempts to stifle the media and block information from reaching the outside world,” said Aruna, a reporter who covered the protests for HMTV. “Right from the start, there were attempts to brand the students naxalites or Maoists so that police could legitimise violence on students in the minds of the public.”
The public hearing was organised by Hyderabad Forum for Telangana, Civil Liberties Monitoring Committee, Human Rights Forum, Telangana Lawyers Collective and Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee. The committee will soon come out with a report which will then be circulated to the offices of different public representatives, State Human Rights Commission among others.
The outcome could be best gauged in the words of Prof. Susie Tharu: more than the actual violence, the concerted attempt to destroy the spirit of a generation, most of whom are first generation learners in their family, was depressing.
–Agencies