Only Cong is secular ‘from Delhi to galli’, avers Uttam

Hyderabad: State Irrigation and Civil Supplies Minister N Uttam Kumar Reddy on Tuesday asserted that the Congress was the only party that remained truly secular "from Delhi to Gully" and the sole force capable of defeating the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) both in Telangana and across India.

Addressing a minority meeting at Yousufguda as part of the Jubilee Hills by-election campaign in support of Congress candidate Naveen Yadav, he argued that regional parties like the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) were politically unreliable and had repeatedly facilitated the BJP’s growth by dividing the secular vote base.

The meeting was also addressed by TPCC President B Mahesh Kumar Goud, Advisor to Telangana Government Mohammed Ali Shabbir, Ministers Ponnam Prabhakar and Md Azharuddin, and other senior leaders.

“The BRS will meet the same fate as the Telugu Desam Party (TDP),” Uttam Kumar Reddy stated, recalling that the TDP’s opportunistic alliance with the BJP led directly to its political decline. He stressed: “Wherever regional parties grow, Congress declines, and BJP gains. BRS too has been acting as a silent partner of the BJP. It never protested when the BJP reduced budgets for minorities or targeted their educational and employment opportunities.”

He said that while the BRS government failed to protect minority institutions and interests, the Congress had a long and verifiable record of empowerment. The Minister alleged that nearly 80 per cent of minority colleges had closed during the BRS regime and welfare schemes for minority men were left incomplete.

“In contrast, the Congress government announced a Minority Declaration with a Rs 4,000 crore budget and a Minority Sub-Plan. Out of this, Rs 1,000 crore subsidy was earmarked for the first two years. Though not fully released yet, the process has started, and the implementation is underway,” he explained.

Elaborating on the educational achievements, he said that in the past 22 months of the Congress government’s rule, 2,200 additional engineering seats were sanctioned for minority colleges, while one law college and one pharmacy college were approved exclusively for minority students.