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Published Oct 17, 2025 | 3:24 PM ⚊ Updated Oct 17, 2025 | 3:24 PM
Konda Surekha. (X)
Remember President George W. Bush’s twin daughters, who were cited for underage drinking in 2001? Well, Telangana police too seem to have found their own “law versus power” moment — visiting a minister’s residence in Hyderabad at night.
Our Telangana police, it appears, fear no god or goddess — not even the Environment Minister herself. Late into the night, they descended on Minister Konda Surekha’s residence, raising not just questions but also the temperature around the “environment.”
Their mission? To question her former officer on special duty, N Sumanth, reportedly in connection with a case registered at the instance of Nalgonda Minister Uttam Kumar Reddy.
But hold on — was this “the law taking its course,” or the chief minister’s will taking its course? Nobody is confirming it, but the timing, tone, and target have set tongues wagging across Telangana’s political landscape.
After all, it’s not every day that police officers dare to knock on a minister’s door — and that too, one like Surekha’s. Yet, to their credit, they showed remarkable restraint even when faced with a barrage of accusations and expletives from Surekha’s daughter, Sushmita Patel.
Let us admit it — most of us can’t even look a police officer in the eye without feeling our spine melt. But before ministers and their kin, the same police transform into docile kittens. The poor officer on duty looked like a schoolboy caught with his hand in a cookies’ jar as Sushmita grilled him on whether the state was still under Congress rule or had slipped into someone else’s control.
Now, was she implying that party affiliation grants impunity? That is a googly for anyone to interpret. The officer, wisely, chose silence — mumbling something between apology and confusion — as she delivered a lecture.
The brave officers who dared to visit the minister’s home at midnight seemed to lose their nerve when faced with the minister’s fiery daughter. Perhaps the real test of courage isn’t entering a minister’s house — it’s staying calm once you’re inside.
And yet, the question refuses to die: Did the police go there purely on legal grounds, or was there a nudge — perhaps a phone call — from the top? Telangana’s political grapevine insists that such courage doesn’t come naturally. Some whisper that the chief minister himself ordered the visit — a subtle message that even ministers and their entourages are not above the long arm of the law.
Surekha’s daughter, however, has her own theory — that this entire “witch-hunt” was triggered because her mother allegedly resisted the Chief Minister’s interest in certain Endowments Department lands. She even named a few Reddy ministers and MLAs from Warangal as part of the supporting cast in the melodrama.
While this high-voltage scene played out under Hyderabad’s night sky, the chief minister maintained sphinx-like silence. Revenue Minister P Srinivas Reddy, who Surekha accuses of hijacking Medaram Jathara works in her district, dismissed the whole episode as a “storm in a teacup.”
After an earful from Congress in-charge Meenakshi Natarajan, Surekha seems to be keeping her fingers crossed — perhaps wondering whether the next knock on the door will be from the police again… or from the party high command.