Liquor war chaos in Vizianagaram

VIZIANAGARAM/HYDERABAD: The normally placid town of Vizianagaram teetered on the edge of chaos Monday with TDP and Congress workers massing in the main street as part of the ongoing war of words between TDP chief Chandrababu Naidu and PCC chief Botcha Satyanarayana.Displaying a ‘stop me if you can’ attitude, Naidu and his men marched on to the district collectorate, defying prohibitory orders and police barricades.Botcha preferred to stay put in the state capital but his words of invective mobilised enough Congress workers to stage a dharna of their own earlier in the day.The point Naidu has been making is that the PCC chief and his family are deeply involved in the liquor syndicates operating in the state, and Botcha has been saying that TDP men are not teetotallers either.While the mutual accusations are not new, the choicest epithets employed by the two leaders imparted an intense charge to the day’s proceedings.With both parties high on rhetoric, police clamped Section 144 in the area around the collectorate, posting 3,000 personnel along the main street and erecting barricades to stop the activists.The DIG of Visakhapatnam range, Sowmya Mishra, the superintendents of police of Visakhapatnam, Srikakulam and Vizianagaram districts and 12 deputy superintendents of police camped in town to supervise the security arrangements.All the same, Congress workers managed to slip through and picketed the collectorate for two hours in the morning, led by minister Thota Narasimham and District Congress Committee president K Veerabhadra Swami.Later, Naidu led scores of party workers in a rally from the NTR statue to the collectorate but were stopped by the police.So the TDP boss and his followers hunkered down on the road.When TDP workers tried to remove the barricades, police resorted to a mild lathicharge in which several TDP men sustained injuries including MLA P Ashok Gajapati Raju.Then, to break the stalemate, police allowed Naidu and his men were allowed to go through.The action in Vizianagaram had its echoes in Hyderabad with TDP workers trying to besiege the residence of Botcha.Police stopped and detained some of them.In the Assembly premises, TDP MLC Nannapaneni Rajakumari tried to stage a dharna at the Gandhi statue but police would have none of it.She moved her act to the Assembly gate but was picked up by the police.At the end of the day, Vizianagaram heaved a sigh of relief that little more than hot words were traded.Naidu was all defiance: “Nothing can stop us.I am not scared.If necessary I will go to Botcha’s residence to stage dharna,” he thundered.Far away in Hyderabad, PCC chief Botcha continued to mock Naidu and blamed him for bringing his native town to the boil, a town that never before saw even Section 144 imposed.