Revanth Reddy’s Boycott Call Mirrors the Purification He Condemns

Telangana Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy told the Assembly on September 9 that the state should socially boycott the family of Bharat Rashtra Samithi chief K. Chandrasekhar Rao after party workers poured turmeric water on a road Dalit marchers had used. He ordered Hyderabad Joint Commissioner of Police Vijay Kumar to run a full inquiry from September 6, covering abuse of Speaker Gaddam Prasad Kumar, clashes with police, and the ritual outside Rao’s Erravalli farmhouse, and said the 1989 law on caste atrocities would be used where it fitted.

He also read, as proof that Rao had ordered the wash, a post from an X handle BRS says does not belong to anyone in the party. The handle went dead the same day.

Turmeric Water on the Road to Erravalli

Congress Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe wings, with Mala and Madiga groups, took a Chavu-Dappu march on September 8 from Varadarajpalli village to the farmhouse in Siddipet district. The drum protest asked Rao to apologise for remarks by BRS MLC Tata Madhusudan, known as Tata Madhu, against the Speaker, who is from a Scheduled Caste. Reddy said more than 1,000 Dalit leaders walked that route and that they did not abuse Rao.

BRS workers then washed the same stretch with water and sprinkled turmeric, and in some clips milk, on the ground the marchers had used. Hindu-language coverage of a video named BRS women’s leader Pavani Goud among those pouring the mix, and people in the clip said they were cleaning a road that Congress “goons” had made impure. Transport and BC Welfare Minister Ponnam Prabhakar told the Legislative Council that turmeric, used in temples across Telangana, had been turned into an insult to people who had a right to protest.

Mala and Madiga organisations objected once the clips spread, and BRS workers stopped the wash on the farmhouse road, according to Congress Madiga Mala Sanghala JAC chairman Devani Satish Madiga. Satish said BRS cadre had called the road “polluted.” He also said a zero FIR naming Rao and BRS workers had been filed at Saifabad police station, a claim the police have not separately laid out in public.

Deputy Chief Minister Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka told the House the wash was an insult to Dalit workers and that Telangana was being pulled back toward a medieval test of who may walk where. Reddy put the blame on Rao’s “feudal” mindset and asked why the former chief minister had not called the marchers in for talks.

Speaker Gaddam Prasad Kumar Gets a 21-MLA Walkout

The farmhouse row did not start in Siddipet. It started at the Assembly gate on September 7, the first day of the monsoon session, when BRS MLAs arrived in black T-shirts printed with slogans about Congress promises. Police blocked them. Shoving followed. BRS working president K.T. Rama Rao and deputy floor leader T. Harish Rao later said women MLAs P. Sabitha Indra Reddy and V. Sunitha Laxma Reddy were grabbed, and that other MLAs were knocked down.

In that crush, Tata Madhu and MLC Naveen Kumar Reddy were accused of abusing the Speaker and his mother. Officer on Special Duty Pollepalli Venkatesam filed a complaint. Saifabad police arrested both men on September 8 under the SC/ST Act and Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita Section 352, then a city court refused remand and they walked out on personal bond. The Council suspended them for the rest of the session after the Assembly sent over a resolution.

Speaker Prasad Kumar told BRS members he should be the one who was angry, because he and his mother had been abused. In another exchange he said the MLC had abused his mother, not theirs, and that he had emotions. Legislative Affairs Minister D. Sridhar Babu said the Speaker had been in tears. On September 9, after a third day of slogans in the well, Sridhar Babu moved a suspension motion and Prasad Kumar put 21 of the party’s 27 MLAs out for the rest of the session, including Rama Rao and Harish Rao.

THE WEEK IN NUMBERS

• 21 MLAs out: Speaker Gaddam Prasad Kumar suspended 21 BRS legislators, among them K.T. Rama Rao and T. Harish Rao, for the rest of the monsoon session.
• 27 in the House: BRS holds 27 Assembly seats, so six of its MLAs were left to sit after the vote.
• Two MLCs booked: Tata Madhusudan and Naveen Kumar Reddy were arrested on September 8 and released the same day after a court rejected remand.
• Three sitting days: The clash ran Monday through Wednesday before the suspensions landed.

BRS opened Wednesday by demanding action against Congress MLA Veerlapally Shankar, who the party said had wished for Rao’s death in public. Sridhar Babu replied that Congress wanted Rao to live a hundred years as leader of the opposition and that the House had already asked Rao to apologise for Tata Madhu’s language. BJP floor leader E. Maheshwar Reddy asked that the suspensions be lifted so the state could talk about other business. Vikramarka told him every member owed the chair the same honour.

THE FOUR DAYS

1. September 6, 2026: Reddy says BRS leaders meet at a farmhouse and plan to wreck the session so the House cannot debate Dharani, education, and land files from their years in office.
2. September 7, 2026: BRS MLAs in black T-shirts are stopped at the gate, police and legislators shove, and two MLCs are later accused of casteist abuse of the Speaker and his mother.
3. September 8, 2026: The two MLCs are arrested and freed; Dalit groups drum-march to Erravalli; turmeric water hits the road; the High Court tells police they cannot bar MLAs from the House.
4. September 9, 2026: Twenty-one BRS MLAs are suspended; Reddy announces the Vijay Kumar probe, the boycott line, and the Kasab comparison; Congress and BRS both call on Governor Shiv Pratap Shukla.

Reddy’s charge is that the pink party wrecked the session because a real debate would open Dharani, education-sector files, 22-A land cases, and the debt left from a decade in power. BRS working president Rama Rao says the government is running from its own record and from the pictures of police hands on women MLAs.

The Handle the Chief Minister Read Aloud

The legal case against the road wash still has to prove who ordered it. Reddy tried to close that gap on the floor by quoting an X account in the name of Sandhya Rao, which he treated as a BRS voice, as saying that on Rao’s orders every place Dalits had stepped around the farmhouse had been purified with turmeric water. “Mr Speaker, is there anything more insulting than this? Even the emperors of the Middle Ages did not behave like this,” he said.

BRS spokesperson Manne Krishank said the party has no post of international general secretary and no leader named Sandhya Rao. He said the handle was a fake, that it was shut within minutes, and that Reddy had read a Congress-made account into the record. Rama Rao, after seeing the Governor, went further on the pictures themselves: “All the images released by the Congress today were AI-generated.” He said BRS would file a police complaint, and would go elsewhere if the police refused.

Those two claims do not cancel the Pavani Goud clips, which several accounts described as live video of a wash, not a still. They do mean the chief minister’s best sentence for pinning the order on Rao came from a handle that did not survive the afternoon. A government that wants the SC/ST Act to carry this fight now has to show, without that post, that the insult was aimed at caste and that the people pouring the water were not Scheduled Caste themselves.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The wash: Videos and on-the-road accounts put BRS workers, including Pavani Goud, pouring turmeric water on the Erravalli approach after the September 8 dappu march.
• The Speaker case: Tata Madhusudan and Naveen Kumar Reddy were booked, arrested, and released, then suspended from the Council for the rest of the session.
• The probe: Joint Commissioner Vijay Kumar is to examine events from September 6, including an alleged farmhouse plan and the road ritual.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• KCR’s order: Reddy’s floor quote of Sandhya Rao is the public thread tying Rao to the wash; BRS says the account was fake and is gone.
• The pictures: Rama Rao says the Congress stills of the ritual are AI-generated; that complaint had not produced a public FIR by the next morning.
• The Saifabad FIR: Satish said a zero FIR names Rao; police have not issued their own account of that filing.

Vikramarka compressed the week into two beats the Treasury wants voters to hear: on day one a BRS MLC insulted a Dalit Speaker, and on day two BRS leaders washed a Dalit protest off a road. “How long will you carry on with the anti-Dalit politics?” he asked. The vanished handle is the part of that story the government cannot rest on.

Why Revanth Reddy Named Kasab in the House

Reddy did not stop at the statute book. He put the Speaker insult in a line with people who have attacked the Indian state.

Those who attack Parliament, Kasab who carried out the Mumbai attacks, terrorists responsible for the Pulwama attack and those who insult the Speaker with casteist mindset cannot be treated very differently.

A. Revanth Reddy, Chief Minister, Telangana Assembly, September 9, 2026

He asked whether Telangana was living in a democracy or behaving like demons from the Stone Age. He then reached for a penalty the criminal law does not write down.

We have to socially boycott the KCR family. It is not the roads that need purification, the mindset of untouchability needs to be changed.

A. Revanth Reddy, Chief Minister, Telangana Assembly, September 9, 2026

A social boycott is a village weapon. It is how a dominant group cuts a family off from work, water, and marriage. Hearing it from a chief minister, aimed at a former chief minister’s household, turns a caste injury into a call for extra-legal isolation while the same speech invokes police, the SC/ST Act, and a senior IPS officer. Reddy has used the boycott threat on this family before, including in February 2025 when he said society should shut out Rao, Rama Rao, and Harish Rao if they stayed out of a caste survey. The tool is familiar. The week’s fuel is new.

He also tied Erravalli to a national wound. After Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge spoke at Haldwani’s Ramlila Maidan on August 8, a group performed a shuddhikaran havan at the ground on August 10. Kharge said the purification of the stage made him feel the sting of untouchability and asked for a case under the untouchability law. Reddy told the Telangana House the two rituals were of a piece. The comparison helps Congress, and it also shows how fast a local road wash is being scaled into a countrywide purity fight.

The boycott line fits a year in which Reddy has put caste arithmetic on the Congress ledger, including a cabinet that named three BC women after he dropped Konda Surekha. Dalit dignity is now the language in which he wants the monsoon session remembered. The cost is that Kasab’s name and a family boycott travel with that language, and they will be quoted back at him for as long as the probe runs.

The High Court Sides With the Women MLAs

While Reddy was recasting the week as a caste crime, Justice T. Madhavi Devi of the Telangana High Court was looking at the gate. Hearing a writ from BRS MLA Talasani Srinivas Yadav, she asked whether this was the respect police showed women, and women legislators. She said House-rule breaches were for the Speaker, not the police, and directed the director general of police to identify officers in the manhandling and act against them.

That order sits beside Reddy’s terror analogy and does not flinch. BRS women MLAs say they were held by the neck and had sarees pulled. The government says BRS men also laid hands on police, and Minister Seethakka asked why the women had been pushed to the front. Sridhar Babu said the chief minister, who holds home, had asked for a report on the women’s complaints and that action would follow if the complaints were true. Cases still went in against Sabitha Indra Reddy, Sunitha Laxma Reddy, and Kova Lakshmi.

Rama Rao’s version, taken to the Governor, lists head and hand injuries to himself, Harish Rao knocked down, G. Jagadish Reddy taken to NIMS after a chokehold, and other MLAs beaten. Congress released stills of BRS leaders handling police. Both sets of pictures are now political weapons. The court has already said the police had no business deciding who entered the House. Any SC/ST prosecution that grows out of the same three days will be read against that finding, because the state is asking a court to trust its account of caste insult after a High Court rebuke of its policing.

The offence the government wants is not automatic. Courts have said an insult of a Scheduled Caste person is not enough by itself; the insult has to be tied to caste, and some clauses require that it happen where the public can see it. The provision used to insult a caste member in public view is built that way. Article 17 of the Constitution abolishes untouchability, and the Protection of Civil Rights Act punishes its practice, but a turmeric pot on a public road still has to be shown as caste pollution, not as a party washing away a rival’s slogans. BRS will try to make it the second. Congress will try to make it the first.

Milk on Ambedkar After Turmeric on the Road

Satish, the Congress Dalit organiser who described the Erravalli wash as a slight to Mala and Madiga marchers, did not stop at an FIR. He said the 125-foot statue of B.R. Ambedkar, which Rao had touched, would be symbolically purified with milk on September 10, and he asked Reddy for a crane. The reply to a purity rite was another purity rite, aimed at a bronze the former chief minister had laid a hand on.

That is the twist the floor speeches skipped. Reddy asked how people who wash ground Dalits walked on will wash untouchability out of their minds. His own camp then scheduled a milk wash for a statue. BRS workers in Siddipet burned an effigy of Reddy and shouted that Rao still lived. Two ideas of contamination are now in public, and they look alike.

WHAT EACH SIDE IS ASKING THE STATE TO BELIEVE

Vijay Kumar’s brief now runs across all four rows. He has to test a farmhouse “conspiracy,” a caste slur at the gate, a road ritual, and a social-media trail that already includes a dead account. Prosecutors will also have to show who can be charged under the Act, because the statute bites only when the accused is not from a Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe and the victim is. A badly built case will not just fail in court. It will hand BRS the line that the atrocity file was a political detergent.

Congress leaders led by Vikramarka took a memorandum to Governor Shiv Pratap Shukla asking him, as the state’s constitutional head, to protect the dignity of Dalits and women inside and beyond the legislature. Suspended BRS MLAs went to the same Raj Bhavan the same day and spoke of a failure of constitutional machinery, listing torn sarees and hospital visits. One governor, two files, and a chief minister who wants a family boycotted while his police are under a High Court watch.

The dappu marchers went to Erravalli to make a Dalit Speaker’s humiliation loud enough to reach a farmhouse gate. They got a turmeric wash, a boycott threat, a Kasab sentence, a dead X handle, and a plan to put milk on Ambedkar. Vijay Kumar has to turn that noise into a charge sheet that names people, not slogans.