Andhra Police Foil Plot to Kill Hyderabad University V-C to Avenge Vemula Death, Arrest Two Ex-students

Hyderabad: Andhra Pradesh’s East Godavari police arrested two former students of the Hyderabad Central University (HCU) on Friday for allegedly planning to kill Vice-Chancellor Appa Rao Podile.

According to police, the plan to kill Appa Rao was hatched seeing the antagonism among students against the V-C after the suicide of Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula.

Vemula's suicide in January 2016 led to massive outrage and nation-wide protests seeking justice for him.

Police said, the two were arrested at Pitchukulapadu Junction on Bhadrachalam-Cherla Road when they were returning from the forests after meeting Yapa Narayana alias Haribhushan, the secretary of Telangana State Committee of CPI (Maoist).

Narayana had promised one of the arrested men that he would be a made an important cadre of the CPI (Maoist) if the VC was killed, SP Vishal Gunni said.

Ankala Prudviraj (27) and Chandan Kumar Mishra (28) had studied at HCU and had been attracted to Leftist ideologies and had decided to join the Maoists after some incidents at the university.

Ankala, a native of the Krishna district joined the university in 2010 and studied till 2013. Chandan who hails from Howrah in West Bengal, had joined HCU in 2013 for a post-graduate course.

The Maoist outfit allegedly believes that the killing of the vice-chancellor would help attract more students into their party fold.

According to a press note released by the police, "In January 2018, they met Haribhushan in a forest area between Cherla and Venkatapuram with the help of a Maoist courier. Haribhushan explained the party’s principles, ideology and asked them to try for maximum student recruitment from the university."

"During the discussion, Rohith Vemula’s suicide and the repercussions of the incident were also discussed and they decided that if Appa Rao was killed in the name of the Maoist party, many students would join the party," the press release added.

Haribhushan, the Maoist leader also handed them some letterheads with the outfit’s name on it, meant to be dropped at the murder site.