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After Friday’s encounter, top cop VC Sajjannar hailed as hero in Hyderabad
Such was the adulation Sajjannar received that people performed a “milk bath” to his portraits in several parts of Hyderabad soon after the encounter. At Shadnagar, people showered petals on him and hailed him as a “super cop”.
Friday morning’s killing of the four men accused in the rape and murder of a 26-year-old veterinarian on the outskirts of Hyderabad last week has once again brought into focus the ruthless nature of Vishwanath C Sajjannar, a 1996-batch IPS officer of Telangana cadre in dealing with rapists, extremists and dreaded gangsters.
Sajjannar, otherwise a soft-spoken and friendly person from Hubli in Karnataka, shot into limelight for the first time in December 2008, when three youths – S Srinivasa Rao, B Sanjay and P Harishkrishna, all in their early twenties, were killed in an alleged encounter with the police in Warangal where he was the district superintendent of police.
The three men had been involved in an acid attack on two engineering students of the Kakatiya Institute of Technology and Science, Warangal – Swapinka and Pranitha, on December 10, 2008. Swapnika died while undergoing treatment while Pranitha survived with serious burns.
The issue had triggered a nationwide uproar then and the police led by Sajjannar arrested the three accused within a day. Two days later, the accused were killed in an alleged police encounter. Sajjannar was hailed as a hero and the local college girls felicitated him with shawls and bouquets.
Subsequently, Sajjannar headed the Special Intelligence Branch of the police, in combined Andhra Pradesh and was instrumental in the elimination of several Maoist leaders in alleged encounters and also the surrender of several other extremists.
In August 2016, when Sajjannar was heading Greyhounds, the elite anti-Maoist wing of the Telangana police, a dreaded Maoist-turned-gangster Mohd Nayeemuddin, who was indulging in extortion, land grabbing and killings was killed in another encounter at Shadnagar.
Now, with Friday’s encounter of the four accused in the veterinary doctor’s case, Sajjannar has once again turned into a hero for the masses and is being flooded with congratulatory messages on social media.
Such was the adulation Sajjannar received that people performed a “milk bath” to his portraits in several parts of Hyderabad soon after the encounter. At Shadnagar, people showered petals on him and hailed him as a “super cop”.
“Hats off to Sajjannar. Had he been the police officer in Vijayawada 10 years ago, justice would have been done to my daughter,” said Shamshad Begum, mother of a 19-year-old girl who was raped and murdered at her hostel in Vijayawada in December 2007.
However, several rights activists did not support his actions, contending that the police should not deliver judgment. “The police cannot become an extra judicial authority. In an attempt to punish a criminal, the police officer cannot commit another crime,” noted rights activist and former Hyderabad Central University professor G Haragopal said.
