HYDERABAD, 26 January 2005 — The southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh shut down yesterday after the murder of an opposition legislator on Monday. Shops, businesses and schools closed across the state following a strike call by the opposition.
Paritala Ravi, a guerrilla leader-turned-politician with the opposition Telugu Desam Party, was killed when unidentified attackers threw homemade bombs at him as he arrived for a party meeting in Anantapur, said district police superintendent S.R. Praveen Kumar. Anantapur is 400 km south of Hyderabad, the state capital.
A member of Ravi’s police security team and one of his friends were also slain in the attack. Ravi had his own private militia, as do many other high-profile Indian politicians.
The assailants escaped on a scooter following the attack, which triggered violence Monday across the state by TDP supporters who blamed the killing on the state’s ruling Congress party. A Congress worker tried to assassinate Ravi in 1997.
Yesterday, a group of TDP supporters blocked a highway near Srikakulam, a town 850 km northeast of Hyderabad, holding up hundreds of buses, trucks and cars, police said. They also clashed with police in Hyderabad, but there were no injuries.
The government also postponed university examinations in Andhra Pradesh, fearing attacks on students.
Chief Minister Y.S. Rajashekhear Reddy, the Congress party’s top elected official in the state, condemned Ravi’s killing and urged calm, pledging to investigate the incident and punish the culprits.
Reddy ordered a federal probe into allegations that his industrialist son, Jagan Mohan Reddy, and a minister in his Cabinet, J.C. Diwakar Reddy, who is not related to him, were involved in the murder.
The allegations, made by Ravi’s family in a police complaint, will be investigated by the Central Bureau of Investigation, India’s equivalent of the FBI.
In violence since Monday, the TDP damaged 557 government-run buses across the state, burning 85 of them, Reddy told reporters.
Ravi, a former member of a group fighting for a separate Maoist state in Andhra Pradesh, renounced guerrilla warfare about 10 years ago and was pardoned in return.
In 1997, he narrowly escaped a car bomb blast at a gala film opening that killed 23 people and injured 31. A Congress party leader, D. Suryanarayana Reddy, and several others were convicted in the case and sentenced to life in prison. The leader is not related to the chief minister who shares the same last name.
Before being pardoned, Ravi faced charges in three murder cases, including being accused of masterminding the killings of two senior Congress leaders.
