LLM Group 5 Criminal Law and Criminal Administration Collective Violence and Criminal Justice System 2025-26 Question Paper with Solutions

Two movements, one name

The Telangana question has produced collective violence twice over, in forms that have almost nothing in common. The first was an armed agrarian insurrection between 1946 and 1951 against the landlords of the princely State of Hyderabad and then against the Indian Army. The second was a long agitation for a separate State within the Indian Union, which flared in 1969 and again between 2009 and 2014, and whose violence was overwhelmingly the violence of crowds, police firing, arson and self-immolation rather than of guerrilla warfare.

An answer that treats these as one movement will misdescribe both. The first was directed at a system of land tenure and at a sovereign who was refusing accession. The second was directed at a democratically elected State government and used the ordinary repertoire of Indian mass politics. What connects them is a single grievance repeatedly denied, and a regional memory in which armed struggle is remembered as having worked.

Against them stood the Razakars, the irregular militia of the Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen led by Kasim Razvi, whose raids on villages produced the largest number of civilian deaths and drove the countryside towards the insurgents. When the Indian Union moved on Hyderabad in Operation Polo between 13 and 18 September 1948 the Nizam's forces collapsed in five days, but the violence did not end with accession. The Indian Army then turned on the communist sanghams, and the phase between 1948 and 1951 was in casualty terms the bloodiest of the whole struggle.

The movement was formally withdrawn on 21 October 1951, when the Communist Party of India resolved to contest elections instead. Its concrete achievement was that roughly a million acres had passed, at least temporarily, into the hands of those who worked it, and that vetti had been destroyed as a social institution over a large part of Telangana.

The final phase from 2009 was again dominated by crowd violence, arson of public transport and government buildings, prolonged general strikes such as the sakala janula samme of 2011, and a sustained wave of student suicides and self-immolations which functioned politically as a form of violence turned inward. The Union response was procedural: the Committee for Consultations on the Situation in Andhra Pradesh under Justice B.N. Srikrishna, constituted on 3 February 2010 and reporting on 30 December 2010, which set out six options and favoured a united State with a statutorily empowered Regional Council. The demand was nonetheless conceded, and Telangana came into existence on 2 June 2014 under the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act, 2014.

It held that where a protest turns destructive the High Court or the Supreme Court may appoint a Claims Commissioner to assess damages, that the organisers of the event may be made prima facie liable and put to proof of their absence of complicity, and that video and other evidence should be gathered by the police as a matter of course. Read with the Prevention of Damage to Public Property Act, 1984, it is the legal answer to the burning of buses that marked 2009 to 2014.

Ramlila Maidan Incident, In re, (2012) 5 SCC 1 supplies the limit on the other side. A sleeping crowd at a permitted assembly was evicted at midnight after a prohibitory order under what was then section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, now section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023. The Court held that the power is preventive and not punitive, that it cannot be used to disperse a peaceful assembly which has caused no apprehension of disorder, and it awarded compensation and directed disciplinary action against the police. The Telangana agitations were policed almost entirely through this provision, and the case is the measure against which that policing must be judged.

Socio-political implications

Three implications deserve to be named. First, the land question: the abolition of jagirdari in Hyderabad and the Hyderabad Tenancy and Agricultural Lands Act, 1950 were legislative responses to an insurrection already in progress, which is the clearest Indian example of agrarian violence forcing tenurial reform. Second, the movement supplied the organisational template and much of the personnel for the later Naxalite movement in the same districts, so the state's security problem in Telangana outlived the grievance that produced it. Third, the 2014 settlement established that a linguistic State is not a permanent unit, and that sustained agitation short of insurrection can obtain a new State from Parliament.

The criticism the answer must state

The romantic reading of the armed struggle does not survive scrutiny. Much of the redistributed land reverted to its former holders once the movement was withdrawn; the sanghams themselves practised summary killing, including of poor peasants suspected of informing; and the mass casualties of 1948 to 1951 fell on villagers caught between the dalams and the Army, not on the combatants. Equally, the later agitations imposed their heaviest costs on people with no part in the dispute, and the wave of student suicides is not a form of political participation that any legal order can afford to validate.

That approach was buried by Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India, (1978) 1 SCC 248, which read Articles 14, 19 and 21 together and required any procedure depriving a person of liberty to be just, fair and reasonable. A student should say plainly that the Telangana insurgents were policed under the Gopalan constitution and the Telangana agitators of 2009 under the Maneka one, and that the difference shows in the remedies available: the 1969 firing produced no judicial reckoning at all, while the crowd policing of the later phase is answerable in damages under Ramlila Maidan.

The prosecutorial record of the later phase is equally instructive. Tens of thousands of preventive arrests were made under what is now section 170 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, prohibitory orders were kept in force for months at a stretch, and yet convictions for the destruction of public property were negligible. That gap between mass arrest and negligible conviction is the standing criticism of how India polices agitation: the law is used to incapacitate a movement in the short term and abandoned once the political question is settled.