A few months ago, presumably riding on the back of GenZ protests, Telangana Chief Minister Revanth Reddy announced that a special session of the Assembly would be called to recommend to the Centre that the minimum age to contest Assembly and Lok Sabha elections be reduced to 21 from 25 at present and to the Rajya Sabha and Legislative Councils to 25 from the current 30, via a constitutional amendment. That session is yet to happen. His party, the Congress, has not reacted to this. But Mr Reddy is trying to create a constituency for himself despite appearing comfortably ensconced in power.
The Congress government in Telangana faces no real electoral challenge. Assembly polls are scheduled only for 2028. Barring one seat, no other by-election is due. With 76 out of the 119 seats in the Assembly, the Congress is sitting pretty, with seven members of its ally, the Majlis-e-Ittehad ul Muslimeen, firmly behind it. Most local-body polls are over. The Congress has managed to win around 70 per cent of the seats in those elections.
The only threat is the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) elections, restructured into the GHMC, Cyberabad Municipal Corporation, and Malkajgiri Municipal Corporation. These have been delayed by a year and have previously served as a dipstick for Telangana’s urban vote. The GHMC covered 150 wards, and when the 2020 polls were held, the BJP saw the most dramatic gain, more than doubling its vote share. The pattern repeated itself in the Assembly polls — though the BJP got only about 14 per cent of the vote share, that figure was stuck at 7 per cent in the previous two Assembly polls. True, Telangana is not Hyderabad. But for Mr Reddy, the storm clouds are gathering.
This is why some of the moves his government has made recently are so inexplicable. Hyderabad and surrounding areas have seen massive expansion in the last few decades. Since land records, as in most state capitals, were not digitised, vast tracts of urban land on which residential gated communities and business complexes were built was land for which ownership was not clear. To correct this, the government armed itself with Section 22A of the Registration Act (1908), giving itself the powers to put certain lands (like government, assigned, forest and waqf lands) on the “prohibited list”. Land on this list could not be registered. But during past land-record updates thousands of acres of genuine private patta lands and entire residential colonies were also placed on the prohibited list (22A). On the other hand, colonies were also built on land belonging to waqfs and the cantonment. In short, land ownership was a mess.
Now, Mr Reddy has announced his government will look into all these disputes and sort them out. The Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS), which is in the Opposition, claims this will only create a climate for insider deals, expropriation and bribery. It says the land in question is around 9.8 million acres. A small fraction is private land. By “regularising” these structures, the government will only create more litigation and an opportunity for rent-seeking.
Obviously, this will impact the GHMC polls and the general mood in the state. So, for Mr Reddy, having a fallback, a new constituency of clear-eyed young people, is important. But these things take time. And the Opposition never fails to remind voters that Mr Reddy is originally of BJP stock — his first election was as a candidate of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad. He then joined the Telugu Desam Party and later came to the Congress. Many older-generation Congress leaders had been toiling for decades before he was foisted on them. And so, even as he tries to create a new ground-level constituency, Mr Reddy has to disarm and pension off an older generation of Congressmen. He’s lucky that on that front he has no real challengers within the party.
But luck cannot be strategy. While continuing the BRS’s welfare schemes, he has scouted for investment. With more than 500 global capability centres (GCCs), Hyderabad has 20 per cent of the GCC workforce in India. Despite H1B glitches and information technology struggling to reinvent itself in the artificial-intelligence era, the momentum in Telangana has not really slowed. Capital expenditure in the 2026-27 state Budget is 20 per cent more than in the previous year though the state is heavily in debt. For the moment, Revanth Reddy is in a sweet spot. But two years is a long time in politics.
 "Telangana Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy")