TDP national President N. Chandrababu Naidu exhorted the party’s legal cell to keep the State government under check as it resorted to ‘‘gross misuse of its powers and treated the Indian Constitution itself with disdain’‘.
He thanked the advocates for protecting the party leaders and cadres from the slew of ‘‘false cases foisted on them’‘ by the police at the government’s behest in the last four years, while asserting that he had never seen such an autocratic rule in his political career spanning four-and -a-half decades.
“Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy got several cases booked against me but I fought back having done nothing wrong,” he said.
Addressing the party’s legal cell meeting near Mangalagiri on Saturday, Mr. Chandrababu Naidu said the situation was so pathetic that a YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) MLC (Anantha Udaya Bhaskar) murdered his driver and a legal battle had to be waged in the Supreme Court to get justice done to the victim’s family.
TDP State president K. Atchannaidu was hauled up in cases in which he was implicated and there were many instances where innocent party leaders and the general public were sent to jail and roughed up for questioning the government’s policies and actions, he alleged.
Mr. Naidu said he was also being ‘‘persecuted as the Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy considered it the best way to demoralise the main opposition party’‘, but to no avail.
‘Police breaking law’
One blatant violation of the law by the police was making arrests without serving notices under Sec.41-A of the CrPC. The police were time and again pulled up by courts for acting in such a reckless manner but they seemed to have not yet learnt from their mistakes, he said.
The arrest of Narasapuram MP K. Raghu Ramakrishna Raju and his torture in custody was a glaring example of how the government had been making a mockery of the laws of the land, he observed.
The TDP chief further said G.O. No.1 was an attempt to usurp the right of opposition parties to reach out to the masses, and the police were obstructing Nara Lokesh’s Yuva Galam Padayatra on one pretext or the other.
There had already been a galore of irregularities in the conduct of MLC elections, which should be exposed, said.
The party’s legal cell should look into all the illegal cases registered in the last four years and ensure that justice was done to the aggrieved, by filing quash petitions in courts and private cases against the officers who misused their powers, Mr. Naidu added.
TDP State president K. Atchannaidu and legal cell president Posani Venkateswarlu were among those present.
