Chiranjeevi

Hyderabad, Nov. 17: A sea of fans craving for a glimpse of Chiranjeevi surged forward as his caravan rolled into Dharmavaram this afternoon, setting off a stampede that ended in the death of two persons.

Having waited three hours, a relieved Tajuddin began running alongside the superstar-politician’s customised Volvo bus when it finally showed up, but slipped and fell and got trampled to death, police said.

Another fan, Adiranarayana, fell off the branch of a tree he was sitting on and was crushed under running feet. A third, Ramana, sitting on the same tree in NTR circle in the town, 370km from Hyderabad, was badly injured in a fall.

Hundreds had lined up along the streets and gathered at traffic junctions, on rooftops and trees to see the Praja Rajyam chief, who has been holding roadshows across Andhra since October.

But in the absence of stringent crowd-control measures and security arrangements — generally provided by the police — things got out of hand, sources said.

The incident has turned the glare on the slack security provided to rival politicians in the state and the alleged indifference of the police towards them. A Telugu Desam roadshow near Vijayawada on November 5 was similarly ignored, reports said.

Since Chiranjeevi began criss-crossing the state, he has been protected by a band of 500 volunteers who work in shifts to regulate the crowds around his vehicle. The police have allegedly never bothered with crowd regulation on the streets.

The actor has announced a compensation of Rs 1 lakh each to the families of the two victims.

Dharmavaram, in Anantpur district, had hit the headlines in the nineties during one of N.T. Rama Rao’s yatras. A gun of one of his guards had accidentally gone off, killing seven persons in the crowd.