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Hyderabad, Jan. 28: A court today asked police to file cheating cases against Union home minister Sushil Kumar Shinde and predecessor P. Chidambaram for allegedly making false promises on Telangana, the directive coming amid escalating statehood protests.
The order of the district court of Ranga Reddy, near Hyderabad, came on a petition accusing the Congress leaders of having deceived statehood campaigners with their assurances — Shinde over a month ago and Chidambaram at the height of the agitation in 2009.
TRS chief K. Chandrasekhar Rao accused the Congress of “cheating the people of Telangana for three generations”. He was speaking at a protest alongside BJP leaders as part of a 36-hour demonstration to step up pressure on the Centre, which yesterday said it needed more time for consultations.
Students, the driving force of the agitation earlier, hit the streets today too. That included Osmania University students, who tried to break barricades on way to Indira Park, where Rao and the others were demonstrating.
In Warangal, 150km away, the protests took on an ominous edge. Five students forced their way into the chamber of the Kakatiya University vice-chancellor with petrol bottles and threatened to set themselves ablaze. The vice-chancellor was not in the office then and the cops had to struggle before they managed to detain the five. An Indira Gandhi statue was damaged.
In Hyderabad, statehood campaigners under the Telangana Joint Action Committee asked pro-Telangana Congress ministers, MPs and MLAs to resign or face a “boycott”. The ministers responded by saying they weren’t clinging on to their chairs, only “waiting patiently” for the high command to decide.
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