HYDERABAD: P Hemalata, wife of revolutionary writer and VIRASAM founder P Varavara Rao, has written an open letter to Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao, asking him to make his stand on the writer’s arrest public. Varavara Rao was arrested in the alleged Bhima Koregaon violence case last year.
The activist has been imprisoned in Pune’s Yerawada Central jail for the last five months in a case which, according to Hemalata, was based on “false allegations and fabricated evidence.” “As part of a large conspiracy hatched by the Centre, Maharashtra government and the Sangh Parivar had made up a false case,” she claimed in the letter. “Varavara Rao is a worthy child of Telangana,” she said, adding that it was KCR’s responsibility of the Chief Minister to take a stand on the arrest. She recalled that, in 2005, KCR had gone to meet Varavara Rao in Chanchalguda jail after the latter’s organisation Revolutionary Writers’ Association was banned.
“As a minister in the Central Cabinet, you visited him in Chanchalguda jail on September 3, 2005, brushing aside protocol objections raised by the then State government. A judges’ panel had struck down the ban on the organisation three months later, but by the time you met him, the ban was in vogue. I hope you, as a person who set aside protocol and met him in jail, would take a similar position when he is being subjected to similar atrocious incarceration,” she wrote.
“When a person who stood for the interests of Telangana people for so long is being subjected to the machinations of the police of a neighbouring State, it is the responsibility of Telangana as a society to raise its voice,” she stated.
She held that just like the revolutionaries, even Varavara Rao was an advocate for the separate statehood of Telangana. She recalled the association of Varavara Rao with other writers and Telangana advocates Kaloji Narayana Rao and Prof K Jayashankar. “In the past, there were 25 cases booked against him but 13 were quashed with no proof,” she stated.