Congress Finds Telangana’s Real Threat: Black T-Shirts

The Congress government in Telangana promised democratic renewal, guarantees and a new relationship with the people. On September 7, it offered the state a more practical version: democratic renewal, provided nobody arrives at the Assembly wearing black. BRS legislators turned up in black T-shirts to protest the Revanth Reddy government’s 1,000-day record. The response was not a confident presentation of achievements. It was an Assembly gate operation, with police and security personnel stopping the legislators and video footage showing a security official pulling former minister and BRS MLA Sabitha Indra Reddy by the hair while trying to remove her.

The government’s defence, delivered through Legislative Affairs Minister D. Sridhar Babu, was that restrictions were justified and that BRS members had behaved improperly towards women police personnel. This is the Congress theory of accountability: if the government cannot answer for its promises, it can answer with a rulebook, a barricade and a lecture on discipline. The black T-shirt, meanwhile, has been promoted from clothing to constitutional threat. Somewhere, a government printer is preparing a circular on the subversive potential of cotton.

KTR demanded that Chief Minister and Home Minister A. Revanth Reddy take responsibility, apologise unconditionally and act against the personnel involved. BRS leaders alleged that women MLAs were pushed, grabbed and pulled by their sarees and hair. Those allegations require proper investigation, not a press-conference exchange in which every side discovers that the other side has manners. But the government’s own position still has a small architectural problem: a government secure in its 1,000-day record normally allows the opposition to enter the building and points at the scoreboard.

Instead, two BRS MLCs, Tata Madhu and Naveen Kumar Reddy, were arrested over alleged derogatory remarks about Speaker Gaddam Prasad Kumar, while the Telangana High Court directed police not to stop BRS MLAs from entering the Assembly. The state government wanted the Opposition outside the Assembly. The High Court had to explain that legislators are allowed to enter it.