Digging into the sordid past of caste violence in Vijayawada that reached a flash-point with the murder of Vangaveeti Mohan Ranga, Jana Sena Party president Pawan Kalyan said the city’s landscape changed with many multi-storeyed buildings dotting the skyline, but the people’s mindset remained the same as things continue to veer around to one’s caste.
“We can’t talk about Vijayawada politics without making a mention of the caste clashes, particularly the Ranga episode, as thousands of families of all castes suffered a lot in the wake of his killing, which was itself a wrongful act as there were laws to punish if he had done anything that made his rivals take a revenge by killing him in broad daylight when he was unarmed. It is time people rose above the caste feeling if Amaravati is to shape up into a world-class capital city”, Mr. Kalyan said
Addressing party workers from Krishna and Guntur districts here on Friday, Mr. Kalyan said he knew people who returned from Vijayawada to Hyderabad as they were constantly pricked about their caste and these passions were stoked by some vested interests so much that it became an irritant.
He claimed to have forgotten the insult that was heaped on him during the Telugu Desam regime in the form of an alleged attack on him by the followers of Paritala Ravindra. “There was a sustained campaign that the supporters of Ravindra forcefully got my head shaved, which finally hit the news headlines at the behest of some Telugu Desam leaders, who did it deliberately to malign me. People know the extent of truth in it. Leaving those days behind, I supported the same Telugu Desam , as I believed it has the capacity to take the State forward under the leadership of Chandrababu Naidu. I could not throw my weight behind Jagan Mohan Reddy as he is mired in corruption,” he recalled.
Hyderabad development
Mr. Kalyan went on to say that Hyderabad was already a multi-cultural city with a cosmopolitan outlook when Mr. Naidu gave it the lift that won the global acclaim.
This was not to undermine his (Mr. Naidu’s) efforts in the development of Hyderabad, he said, while pointing out that caste was not a dominant thing in Telangana, unlike in Andhra Pradesh.
It is imperative that the situation should change in Andhra Pradesh sooner or later, Mr. Kalyan added.
