TDP ‘goons’ attacked our office after report on steel plant privatisation, says Deccan Chronicle

The Visakhapatnam office of the Deccan Chronicle was attacked allegedly by workers of Andhra Pradesh’s ruling Telugu Desam Party, the newspaper said on Wednesday.

The newspaper said that its office was attacked by “goons” of the ruling party after it published “an unbiased report on VSP [Visakhapatnam Steel Plant] privatisation”. “Intimidation tactics won’t silence us,” the Deccan Chronicle said in a social media post, tagging the accounts of the Telugu Desam Party and its coalition partners the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Jana Sena Party.

On Tuesday, the newspaper reported that Andhra Pradesh’s newly-formed coalition government might make a U-turn and allow the privatisation of the Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Limited, the corporate entity of the Visakhapatnam Steel Plant.

The decision to privatise the steel plant has been pending for more than three years amid protests by workers’ unions and objections by the previous state government of the YSR Congress Party, the newspaper reported.

The report quoted Union Minister of State for Heavy Industries Bhupathi Raju Srinivasa Varma as having said in a meeting on Monday that the Visakhapatnam Steel Plant “incurred huge losses this year also and the Central government would not allow waste of public money”.

His statement came a week after Telugu Desam Party’s Andhra Pradesh unit chief Palla Srinivasa Rao told Deccan Chronicle that the state government was seeking...

Read more