Published Jun 12, 2026 | 8:14 AM ⚊ Updated Jun 12, 2026 | 8:16 AM
Revanth Reddy's Hydra-headed gaffe! Cartoon: Satish Acharya
Synopsis: Revanth is not alone in professing his admiration for Hitler. But the CM would have done well to remember the history of Telangana.
“I would like to write about blossoming apple trees, but General, your tar-smeared speeches are making me write this poetry,” wrote the German poet Bertolt Brecht in a poem addressed to Hitler.
Of course, there are no apple trees in Telangana; in fact, there are no blossoming trees at all now. Every day, news arrives from somewhere that feels like both scorching summer and biting winter at once.
This week, I intended to write about the “generosity” of the government’s policy statement that announced wages—under the name of “minimum wages”—which are not even sufficient for lakhs of workers to survive at a minimum level. But in the meantime, a tar-smeared speech by a local general has pushed itself forward. Now, there is no option but to rip open that speech and show the worms inside.
On Saturday, at a seminar organised by The Hindu in Bengaluru, during a conversation with N Ram, Director of The Hindu Group, on the theme Good Governance in Telangana: For the People, By the People, Of the People, Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy displayed his ignorance. He attempted to justify an act of aggression with an untruth. In the process, he declared that he admires and follows Adolf Hitler, the Nazi dictator detested across the world.
Let us begin with the first lie he uttered. N Ram asked, “What is the idea behind the name HYDRAA, under which rapid and aggressive action is being taken to protect lakes and remove encroachments in Hyderabad? What is its origin?”
In response, Revanth Reddy said: “If poor people encroach upon lakes and drains, it can be understood. But the rich are encroaching on water resources for their luxury and farmhouses… I wanted to create a strong task force, so I brought in HYDRAA. The word Hydra was very dear to Hitler. He used to call his core team, capable of eliminating anyone, as Hydra. I established this inspired by Hitler…”
The claim that Hitler liked the word “Hydra” is a blatant lie. The claim that he drew inspiration from Hitler is an involuntary truth.
The word “Hydra” appears nowhere in Adolf Hitler’s life.
Hitler built organisations such as the National Socialist Party (Nazi Party), the Schutzstaffel (SS), the Gestapo, and the Wehrmacht, but there is no “Hydra” anywhere in the history of Nazi Germany.
Two decades after Hitler’s death, in the 1960s, the American publishing company Marvel created, in its comic series later adapted to screen—particularly in the stories of Captain America and The Avengers—a fictional, secret, fascist, science-fiction terrorist organisation called Hydra. The writers even imagined it as having Nazi origins. Hydra is fiction; its supposed Nazi roots are another fiction. It is a complete fabrication.
It is unlikely that Revanth Reddy even knows about the Marvel comics series; it must have entered his awareness through hearsay. Apprenticeship under Chandrababu Naidu, who declared that “history is unnecessary,” and early learning in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which treats myths and fabricated legends as history while distorting real history, can indeed produce a person who treats history with such disdain.
By saying that Hydra’s defining feature is the ability to crush opponents by any means, lawful or unlawful, that this is what Hitler liked, and that he adopted it inspired by Hitler, Revanth Reddy seems to have ignored the truth about Hydra altogether and focused only on two elements: crushing opponents and drawing inspiration from Hitler. His brazenness in proudly displaying his destructive actions—saying, “If you want, look at the images of my demolitions on Google; they resemble what Israel did in Gaza”—is already well known.
The question is: can a person who is the ruler of Telangana—a land with a heroic history of people’s struggles—and the head of a democratic government openly declare Hitler as his source of inspiration? Does he even know who Hitler was?
Adolf Hitler was one of the most wicked and cruel dictators known to history. He was a mass murderer who orchestrated the killing of six million Jews simply because they belonged to a different religion. Not only for that reason, but also because they appeared different, thought differently, and did not belong—according to him—to the sacred Aryan race’s land, he ordered the killing of millions of others: Gypsies, the disabled, political opponents, and Slavic peoples.
He herded thousands into gas chambers and exterminated them with poison gas. He lined people up and shot them. He subjected them to forced labour and starved them to death. He ran infamous concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Dachau. By invading European countries, he caused the Second World War, leading to the deaths of at least fifty million soldiers and civilians.
Hitler suppressed dissent. He implemented brutal repression against communists, workers, and women. He committed countless crimes that humanity finds abhorrent. To declare such a mass murderer as an inspiration, for any reason whatsoever, is a disgrace to civilisation and humanity. It is an insult to the defiant culture of Telangana.
However, Revanth Reddy is not alone in declaring Hitler as an inspiration—either during Hitler’s final decade or in the eight and a half decades since his death.
Six years before Hitler’s death, in 1939, in his book We, or Our Nationhood Defined, RSS Sarsanghchalak Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar showered praise on Hitler. He wrote that Germany showed how national pride, unity, and glory could be achieved by eliminating minorities, praising Hitler’s massacres and genocides, and even presenting them as an ideal for the Hindu nation. Later, in his 1966 work Bunch of Thoughts, although he did not explicitly name Hitler due to the prevailing climate, he continued to uphold the same approach toward minorities.
Even earlier, another RSS ideologue, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, praised Hitler and his “nationalist” policies in speeches and writings during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Many RSS leaders admired Hitler’s organisational methods, functioning, and ideological propagation.
Within a few years of the RSS’s formation, in 1931, Hindu Mahasabha leader and Savarkar’s mentor Dr Balakrishna Shivram Moonje travelled to Italy to meet Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator and Hitler’s counterpart. He studied the military training institutions for youth run by the fascist party and advocated adopting similar methods to militarise Hindu society.
After returning to India, Moonje established the Central Hindu Military Education Society in 1935 and founded the Bhonsala Military School. Following Mussolini’s model of military and ideological training, the RSS developed its shakha system. It is therefore not surprising that Revanth Reddy, who underwent some training in such a shakha, harbours admiration for Hitler.
There have been scattered examples of others expressing admiration for aspects of Hitler—Bal Thackeray praising his “discipline” and “determination,” Australian Senator Ralph Babet appreciating pro-Hitler cultural displays, American Republican candidate Carl Paladino calling him a “leader needed in today’s times” before retracting his statement, and Japanese Finance Minister Taro Aso suggesting Hitler had “good intentions” before withdrawing his remark.
But after Hitler’s global notoriety, it requires extraordinary brazenness to claim inspiration from him and say one has acted upon it.
If HYDRAA’s stated objectives—according to Revanth Reddy himself—are to ignore encroachments by the poor while targeting the farmhouses of the rich, then attaching to it an inspiration drawn from a falsehood about Hitler is an insult even to that objective. In fact, HYDRAA has not removed encroachments by well-known powerful politicians and the wealthy.
Even in clearing lake encroachments, clear bias is evident. Hundreds of cases where courts have intervened, criticised, raised serious objections and passed strictures indicate that HYDRAA’s functioning is questionable. Thus, even if it is a false example and an incorrect justification, there is no basis here to claim adherence to the “firm resolve” associated with Hitler.
In any case, there are hardly any political leaders entirely free of some ‘Hitlerian’ elements. In a class-based society, that is nearly impossible. Leaders who do not show the urge to crush dissent, who do not inherit some aspect of Hitler’s legacy, are rare. It is difficult to find rulers who do not impose an iron heel on opponents, silence dissenting voices, carry out massacres, or resort to repression. All regimes that parade under the name of “democracy,” and all rulers, have in some measure absorbed elements of Hitler—sometimes openly, often implicitly.
Revanth Reddy, however, foolishly and shamelessly exposed both a lie and a politically perverse statement at a national newspaper’s conference, before the eyes of the world. Perhaps, after the public invitation by Hitler’s latest incarnation to join him, Revanth might have felt the urge not only to join the modern Hitler but also to invoke the spirit of the dead one. It appears as though he is now trying to hold up visibly a flag that he had long concealed.
The people of Telangana, even when Hitler was alive and shortly after his death, addressed a local Hitler as “worse than the Nazis” and warned that they would dig his grave—and they did. It would be good if the Chief Minister of Telangana remembers, even a little, this glorious history of Telangana.
(Views are personal.)
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