Peace prevails in Hyderabad

However, additional paramilitary forces remain deployed in the violence-affected areas to ensure that peace prevailed.

The efforts by the police to maintain peace on Friday were buttressed by Islamic scholars. Mufti Khaleel Ahmed, vice-chancellor of the Islamic University of Jamia Nizamia here, ruled that Friday prayers need not be said in a mosque.
Urging Muslims in the curfew-bound areas to pray in their homes, The government has been considering relaxing curfew to enable Friday prayers. Later, it refused to relax curfew heeding police advice.

Meanwhile, Kedarnath, a youth from Kummarivada in the curfew-bound Chandrayangutta locality, died as he could not get medical help on time.

The ambulance, in which he was being transported, was stopped at several places. By the time it reached the hospital he was dead.

Even as top police officials refused to name those behind the communal trouble that has hit the Old City after two decades, one more Congress leader, J C Diwakar Reddy, has asserted that the violence had been provoked to destabilise the Rosaiah government.

Earlier, two Congress leaders from Telangana, Madhu Yashki Goud and Shanker Rao, had made a similar allegation that was roundly denied and condemned by several others in the party. They had pointed fingers at the pro-Y S Rajasekhara Reddy group. They say that the group is disgruntled that their leader Y S Jaganmohan Reddy, son of the late YSR, was not made the chief minister. Hence, it is resorting to violence.  

Diwakar Reddy said many of the 200-odd persons arrested were outsiders.
“Unquestionably, the violence was deliberate and funded. It was an effort to give a ‘shock’ to the Rosaiah government. However, I would not say that it was to overturn the present government,” he said.

However, according to Left parties, the mining mafia of Hyderabad and Karnataka had instigated and funded the trouble considering it had its flood of profits dammed by the Rosaiah government by cracking down on illegal mining.

Meanwhile, the municipal authorities are using the curfew to remove all buntings or flags of both communities.