Hanamkonda custody, democracy “seventh guarantee”
Police took BRS’s T. Harish Rao into custody at the Hanamkonda Collectorate during a TNGO protest and moved him to Subedari PS. The Congress government in Telangana has yet to explain what law that served, beyond the inconvenience of dissent.
The stated legal basis for the custody was not made public.
BRS Legislature Party deputy leader T. Harish Rao was taken into custody outside the Hanamkonda district Collectorate on Tuesday after he turned up at a Telangana Non-Gazetted Officers’ protest. He was shifted to Subedari police station; multiple reports differ only on whether he was escorted on foot or chose to walk there rather than board a police vehicle. According to the reports reviewed, BRS workers objected and there was pushing and jostling near the Collectorate. Former minister Errabelli Dayakar Rao and former chief whip Dasyam Vinay Bhaskar were also detained.
Call it what it is for now: custody, not a confirmed arrest. None of the material reviewed includes an arrest memo, FIR, invoked sections or a police statement. One national report claimed police cited lack of permission/law-and-order, but without an on-record official or document to match. The Congress-run state has not produced a lawful basis in public; what it has produced is a photo-op of Opposition leaders walking to a station.
Harish Rao, for his part, used his X handle to ask what became of Chief Minister Revanth Reddy’s “seventh guarantee” of democracy, saying police have restricted meetings with protesting teachers and employees, and made arrests when Opposition leaders tried to express solidarity with polytechnic students. That tracks with the day’s other agitation: students at Government Polytechnic, Warangal, have been protesting a government order they link to integrating polytechnics with Young India Skills University. The state’s own January note talks up tighter integration to boost employability — it does not answer students’ objections, and the GO text isn’t in the public record we saw.
Employees’ bread-and-butter issues drove the TNGO mobilisation — six pending DAs, PRC implementation, retirement benefits, CPS repeal and OPS restoration — and Harish Rao amplified those demands on the day. Whether the Congress government intends to meet any of them is the part it carefully didn’t say. It found the time to pick up an Opposition MLA; it can surely find the rule book it used to do it.