KARIMNAGAR: After several hours of what seemed like a fierce standoff, police arrested BJP State president and Karimnagar MP Bandi Sanjay Kumar from inside his office after breaking open its grill gate on Sunday night, when he was on his “jagran” protest against GO 317 on the transfer of State government employees.
After disrupting his protest, they physically lifted the BJP leader and took him away in a police jeep. However, it was not easy as they had to struggle for hours while dealing with recalcitrant BJP workers who refused to move away from the office.
The police fought on several fronts, arresting the party workers even as their numbers kept increasing and, at the same time, trying to get inside the office whose grill gate held despite their attempts to break it.For nearly an hour, they used brute force and when it did not help, they brought in gas cutters and began working on the gates. They had to deal simultaneously with the workers who were inside and outside the office, preventing them from breaking the door.
As the number of party workers kept increasing, the police began sending in jets of water from fire tenders through the grill gate in a bid to prevent the workers from resisting their attempts to break in.The police also used lathis and dispersed the crowd several times. Interestingly even Karimnagar Commissioner of Police P Satyanarayana also lathi-charged the crowd. Several workers were severely injured.
Sanjay Kumar, who was in Jagtial in the afternoon, reached Karimnagar at about 8 pm to begin his deeksha and then switched to a bike to take the police by surprise. But the police, who saw him arriving, tried to go near him but the saffron party workers formed a human cordon around him.
Soon intense jostling took place, with BJP workers and the police trying to get an upperhand over the other. Finally, the BJP workers managed to take Sanjay Kumar into his office and close the doors to prevent the police from entering. Meanwhile, the police forcibly took away some mediapersons and teachers who came there to express solidarity with the BJP leader and party workers.
The scene at Sanjay Kumar’s office looked like a war zone with the mass of the crowd swaying in every which way. As the situation became very volatile, the police resorted to lathi-charge in which several party workers and teachers were injured. The BJP leaders alleged that men police dragged women workers to the police vans against the rules.
Before Sanjay Kumar arrived, BJP BC Morcha national president K Laxman reached the party office but the police rounded him up and took him away. The police also arrested party state leaders T Veerender Goud and NV Subhash. Though Laxman tried to contact the police commissioner, the latter did not respond to his calls.
Even before Sanjay Kumar’s arrival at his office, tension peaked since evening with party workers entering into heated arguments with the police when they began removing them and bundling them into waiting police vans. Contending that there was no permission for the protest on account of the surge in Covid-19 cases, the police removed the chairs, some tents, and the sound system at the venue even as the activists rent the air with anti-KCR and anti-TRS government slogans.
The party workers kept raising full-throated slogans while questioning the double standards of the government in allowing TRS meetings and denying permission for theirs. “If there is a surge in Covid-19 cases, how did you allow KT Rama Rao’s public meeting in Nalgonda?” wondered a BJP leader.
A visibly angry Sanjay Kumar, speaking to the media through a window of his office, warned the Chief Minister and KT Rama Rao of a similar fate.