CJP volunteers detained by police near Ramanthapur polytechnic college

Hyderabad: Volunteers of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) were detained by Telangana Police on Thursday, September 11, while extending support to polytechnic students protesting against GO 97 in Ramanthapur, Hyderabad, CJP Telangana coordinator Vijay Mallangi said.

In a post on X, Mallangi said the volunteers were peacefully standing near the college to meet the students after reports of a lathi charge during a protest a day earlier, and asked whether their detention squared with the ruling Congress party’s own “Chhatron Ki Goonj” (Students’ Roar) campaign, led by Rahul Gandhi, which has positioned itself as a platform for student grievances nationally.

The detention comes a day after Telangana Police resorted to a lathi-charge on students protesting at the Government Polytechnic in Ramanthapur on Wednesday, September 10. Videos from the site showed police personnel pushing and shoving students during the confrontation, leaving several injured.

Thursday’s detention is not the first time CJP volunteers have faced restrictions from authorities in Telangana. Weeks earlier, the organisation had alleged that its volunteers were blocked from entering several government schools in Hyderabad and other parts of the state while conducting safety and infrastructure checks under its nationwide “School Thik Karo” campaign, with school administrations citing “orders from above” to deny entry, according to a report in The Hindu.

CJP has said similar resistance to the school audits has played out in other states, including a Rajasthan circular restricting outsiders from entering government schools without permission and a case booked against the campaign’s founder in Maharashtra, and has maintained that its volunteers are conducting civic accountability work rather than pursuing electoral politics.

Students at the Ramanthapur polytechnic, along with those at several other government polytechnics across Telangana, have been protesting for weeks against GO 97, issued on July 3, which renamed the Labour, Employment, Training and Factories Department as SHAKTI (Skill, Human Capital and Knowledge Training Initiatives) and brought government polytechnics under the Young India Skills University (YISU), formed under a public-private partnership.

Students fear the merger will affect their access to the State Board of Technical Education and Training (SBTET) framework and the ECET lateral-entry scheme, which currently allows diploma holders to move directly into the second year of undergraduate engineering courses, and allege it could lead to fee hikes and eventual privatisation.