Rao: Rebel trouble

Hyderabad, May 3: Extremist and Left groups, which made things difficult for P.V. Narasimha Rao in the mid-1990s, are targeting the former Prime Minister again.

Last Thursday, landless party workers occupied around 23.66 acres of agricultural land belonging to the Rao family in his native Vangara village in Karimnagar district, right under the administration’s nose.

During a daylong operation on April 29, the agitators also occupied 10 acres of land belonging to another prominent farmer, Pingali Pratap Reddy.

District police officers say the lands had been left barren and not cultivated for over 20 years because of extremist threats to Rao and Reddy. “No paleru (tenant farmer) came forward to till these lands due to (the) Naxal threat,” a senior member of the Rao family said.

This time around, the extremists have found an unexpected ally in the CPI’s Karimnagar district unit which gave notice of its intention to occupy the land 15 days ago. Police and members of Rao’s family did not pay much attention to the threat.

Revenue and police officers woke up only three days after the occupation, heading to the village yesterday. The agitators told them they had been urging the Raos to hand them the land to house the landless and grow vegetables.

Rao’s family members, living mostly at Warangal and Hyderabad, are understandably dismayed. They said they had in any case lost most of their ancestral property after patriarch Rao, Prime Minister from 1991 to 1996, donated most of it.

“My father gave away lands free for hospitals, schools and even social service organisations,” said P.V. Ranga Rao, the eldest son of the Congress stalwart. What remained of the ancestral property was distributed among Rao’s family and that of his brothers.

The former Prime Minister has been marginalised politically in Andhra Pradesh and at the Centre following the Congress’ electoral rout in 1996. A Central Reserve Police Force contingent, deployed in the village after the People’s War threatened to blast the Rao family house in early 1994, was withdrawn within six months of the 1996 elections. The protection provided to the large Rao clan as well as to their lands in Karimnagar district was withdrawn.

Even the Special Protection Group cover given to Rao was withdrawn nearly a year ago — the former Prime Minister moves around Hyderabad now escorted only by a handful of policemen.

Rao, who lives at the Adarshnagar house of his second son P.V. Rajeshwar Rao, has refused to comment on the matter. But Rajeshwar wants the Centre, if not the Andhra government, to remove those occupying the land illegally. “If such a thing can happen to (a) former Prime Minister’s land, it can happen to anyone,” he said.