AP: Cops asked for Greyhounds

The state government justified its decision to deploy the anti-Naxal Greyhounds force in Osmania University to deal with the pro-Telangana agitation in an affidavit to the top court.
It said the decision was taken after assessing the situation with top police officers.
“The deployment was done on a requisition given by the Hyderabad Police Commissioner and on the instructions of the state’s Director General of Police,” the AP government said, explaining that while deploying the elite force personnel due care was taken that they did not carry sophisticated arms with them.
Admitting that the Greyhounds were essentially created as an anti-Naxal force, the government asserted that there had been practice in the past also to deploy its personnel to maintain general law and order in extreme situations.
Since there was paucity of the police force with the state while it was facing a series of agitations on Telangana issue “the decision was taken consciously after exhausting all the available force,” said the affidavit, filed a day before Friday’s crucial hearing on the state government’s appeal against the AP High Court order removing paramilitary forces from the campus.
The government stated that the Greyhounds were not deployed on “continuous basis” in the campus and called only from time to time according to necessity.