The passage of historic bill in the Andhra Pradesh state assembly seeking to award death penalty for rape and another bill aimed at taking stringent action for crimes on women by setting up of special courts to deal with such offences has caught nationwide attention.
Not just the vernacular media in the Telugu states, even the national media gave a lot of importance to giving wide coverage to the revolutionary bills.
Legal luminaries across the country have hailed them as land mark bills, as they go a long way in giving a deterrent punishment to the rapists.
Though there are sceptics who are doubting the implementation of the bills in letter and spirit due to certain limitations like lack of adequate number of judicial officers and police officers to deal with such cases and lack of mention of financial support for the special courts and additional police forces, they too did not express any doubts over the sincerity and spirit of the bills.
The two bills have generated a lot of positive vibes for the Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy government in both the Telugu states.
Naturally, his own publication Sakshi has dedicated the entire first page only to the passage of these bills, besides providing huge coverage to the same in the inside pages.
Eenadu also gave a massive coverage to the passage of the bills highlight the points of death penalty for rapists and imprisonment for those who harass women through social media.
Andhra Jyothy, too, took the report as second lead though the coverage is too insignificant for such a major development.
Instead, it chose a controversial issue discussed in the assembly as its main lead story – it was about alleged usage of foul words by Telugu Desam Party president N Chandrababu Naidu against assembly marshals on Thursday and Jagan repeating the same words in the assembly on Friday.
Obviously, Andhra Jyothy sought to project that Naidu was not at fault and the foul word was incorporated in the video by YSRC leaders only to defame him.
The arguments and counter-arguments between the treasury benches and the TDP were played up in the news report.
The Andhra high court’s objections to painting of village secretariat buildings with YSRC party colours was another major news report that can be seen only in Eenadu and Andhra Jyothy ostensibly to needle the YSRC government.
Minister for municipal administration Botsa Satyanarayana’s statement that there was no proposal to shift capital from Amaravati is yet another major news that figured prominently in the two newspapers.
The statement assumes significance in the wake of reports that the Jagan government is planning to shift the capital from the existing location.
Eenadu carried an anchor story on Naidu’s outburst against suspension of senior IRS officer Jasti Krishna Kishore, who allegedly gave a negative report to the Centre on Jagathi Publications when he was in the income tax department in 2012. The officer was a close confidant of Naidu during the previous regime.
The outrage in north-eastern states over Citizenship Amendment Bill and allotment of 3,148 acres of land for Kadapa steel plant etc also made the headlines in the two Telugu dailies.