For once, tension appeared to mount in the city, but rival political leaders confined their confrontation to just a war of words so far without precipitating matters further.
Despite apprehensions in a section of the media about possible violence on the streets of Vijayawada, no evidence was available from rival camps to the extent of worsening the situation beyond control.
After issuing a counter-challenge to former minister Devineni Rajasekhar (Nehru), Telugu Desam Party urban wing president Vallabhaneni Vamsi chose to take the issue to the police once again.
He had been complaining that Nehru's son Avinash and his followers attacked a youth owing allegiance to the TDP recently only with the sole intention of intimidating the TDP sympathisers in the city.
In the past few days, tempers ran high, with Mr. Nehru and Mr. Vamsi challenging each other to prove their strength and mettle.
The wordy confrontation aggravated as their followers and colleagues in respective parties also started making comments against one another over the issue.
As mutual allegations continued, the whole team of TDP district and urban leadership expressed their solidarity with Mr. Vamsi and went in a delegation to Commissioner of Police P.S.R. Anjaneyulu to complain how the TDP sympathisers and followers were being targeted and to underscore the need for restricting “intimidatory tactics” allegedly being employed by Mr. Nehru and his men in the city.
The TDP leaders, in their petition, alleged that Mr. Nehru was indulging in “faction politics” with a view to removing any hurdle to his son's rise in city politics in the coming years.
The TDP delegation included MLAs Devineni Umamaheswara Rao, Ambati Brahmanaiah, Kodali Sri Venkateswara Rao (Nani), Bandar MP Konakalla Narayana, Vallabhaneni Vamsi and others. TDP leader N. Chandrababu Naidu also reportedly asked the party cadres to repel the “intimidatory tractics.”
Congress leaders Pyla Somi Naidu and others also held separate press conferences to take on the TDP leaders when they charged Mr. Vamsi with making false charges against their leader Mr. Nehru in the hope of getting political mileage out of it.
They asserted that the Congress cadres would not keep silent if Mr. Vamsi and his followers continued to create unwarranted ill will.
Addressing a press conference on Tuesday, Mr. Devineni Umamaheswara Rao, Mr. Vamsi and all other leaders reiterated that they would jointly meet any brazen attempt from the Nehru group to browbeat or intimidate their party leaders, cadres and sympathisersin the city.
They advised Mr. Nehru to follow democratic ways if he really wanted to see his son's real growth in city politics.
