Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan slams Congress govt in Telangana over demolition drive in Khammam

Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Monday slammed the Congress government in Telangana for reportedly evicting as many as 3,000 families from their legally owned houses at Velugumatla village in Khammam district on February 25. He has demanded a reply from the Congress leadership in Kerala.

In a statement, Mr. Vijayan said the Telangana government had “besmirched” the legacy of Acharya Vinoba Bhave, leader of the Bhoodan Movement, by demolishing the houses constructed and owned by beneficiaries of the voluntary land donation campaign. 

(In the absence of meaningful land reform, the Bhoodan Movement in the early 1950s had sought to reduce landlessness and social inequality by persuading wealthy feudal landowners to donate a small portion of their estate to help the agrarian poor in rural India.)

Mr. Vijayan said “government evictors, bolstered by a huge posse of police and bulldozers,” descended on Vinobha Nagar in the early hours (on February 25) and rendered thousands homeless in hours. 

Mr. Vijayan said mainstream newspapers in Kerala had “obfuscated the trespass on civil and property rights in return for a glut of pricey advertisements” from the Telangana government. The Congress’ national leadership remained silent, he said. 

Mr. Vijayan alleged that the Congress in Telengana had taken a page from the playbook employed by the party’s government in Karnataka to evict Muslim working-class families from their homes at Yelahanka. 

In a Facebook post in December 2025, Mr. Vijayan had termed the bulldozing of Fakir Colony and Waseem Layout (Karnataka) “a shocking replay of the bulldozer raj unfairly targetting minorities in Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled north-Indian States.”

Mr. Vijayan’s remarks had drawn sharp criticism from Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar, who accused Mr. Vijayan of “unnecessary interference made without understanding the facts and an election gimmick”, given the impending Assembly polls in Kerala. 

However, AICC general secretary K.C. Venugopal appeared to correct Mr. Shivakumar immediately, in an apparent bid to negate the CPI(M)’s efforts to equate the Congress with the BJP government vis-à-vis minorities, chiefly Muslims. 

Mr. Venugopal had posted on X that he had spoken to Mr. Shivakumar and conveyed the AICC’s serious concern that such actions should have been undertaken with far greater caution, sensitivity, and compassion, keeping the human impact at the centre.

Mr. Vijayan said the evicted families in Bengaluru were still on the street and the Karnataka government had “done nothing” to rehabilitate them. In stark contrast, Kerala had set a sterling example by rehabilitating the landslide-affected in Wayanad, offering a model of humanism.