On a piece of CCTV footage from Banswada, a police officer watched a boy hand a stone to a man and coax him to throw it. When the officer later called the teenager in, the boy said nothing. That image, the Kamareddy Superintendent of Police (SP) says, is what the first quarter of 2026 looked like in Telangana. Twenty-seven hate crimes across the state, most of them not spontaneous but assembled, driven by fake narratives, WhatsApp forwards and crowds that travelled from outside town to participate.
The incidents were rarely isolated. Behind most of them lay a familiar mix of mob mentality, misinformation and administrative failure. The targets shifted, from Muslims, Dalits, and Hindu temples, but the architecture held.
The quarter opened with trouble at Puranapul Darwaza in the state capital, Hyderabad. An inebriated Muslim man entered the Mysamma Temple premises and allegedly vandalised idols, setting off a wave of shock and anger. Right-wing elements retaliated swiftly, destroying nearby mazars, chanting “Jai Shri Ram, and what began as an act of individual transgression swelled into a 300-member mob, stone pelting, arson and a full-blown communal clash.
Within the same month, the head priest of the revered Chilkur Balaji Temple and three others were booked for hate speech against Muslims. The remarks were made at the “Dharma Raksha Sabha” held in Hyderabad’s Balapur area on January 24, organised by the Bhagyanagar Ganesh Utsav Samithi. Speakers invoked “love jihad,” “economic jihad,” “drug jihad,” and “food jihad,” all theories that have been debunked time and again.
Then came the case of Shaik Shaiksha Vali. The khova bun vendor had travelled to the famed Medaram Jatara to earn a living. He was publicly humiliated, his food declared “poisonous,” and he was forced to prove otherwise on the spot.
The incident, which occurred in January, gained wider traction the following month, drawing sharp condemnation from Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi and Andhra Pradesh Deputy Chief Minister Nara Lokesh. It also brought an outpouring of solidarity from members of the local Hindu community, who visited his stall specifically to buy his buns.
February was the worst month of the quarter, logging 14 hate crime cases, with five of them in Hyderabad alone.
As Ramzan began, tensions flared in Kamareddy’s Banswada. A Muslim man named Muzzamil allegedly objected to a saleswoman playing a devotional song at her workplace. The argument escalated quickly into clashes between Muslim and Hindu groups, with stone pelting on both sides and injuries to several individuals. As many as 37 people were arrested, with all currently out on bail.
Kamareddy SP M Rajesh Chandra offers a more granular account of how it unravelled. What could have passed off as a routine manager-employee dispute, he says, took a different turn when Muzzamil began recording without the saleswoman’s consent. “She, instead of reporting to the police, spread WhatsApp messages saying a Muslim was harassing her. The whole episode took a communal spin,” the officer told Siasat.com. By the time two policemen arrived to defuse the situation, a mob had already gathered. “They started attacking our men. Two RTC buses and nearby shops were damaged,” he said.
Not every case that month originated with Muslims as the target.
On February 24, the Dwimukhi Hanuman Temple in Barkas was found desecrated, with its iron grill broken and the sindhooram on the idol defaced. “No one keeps quiet if the place you consider the holiest is abused,” said one observer. “Tensions are inevitable.”
March brought seven cases, including one Dalit atrocity, spanning a period from Ramzan to Ramnavami.
Goshamahal MLA and former Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Raja Singh released a new song during his annual Shobha Yatra. Its lyrics were explicit: “Hindu Rashtra banega Hindustan. Jeete ji hume karna hai yeh kaam. Yeh saara bhagwa rang se sajega (India will become a Hindu nation. We will need to do this work while we are alive. The entire place will be draped in saffron).”
Veer Shivaji Sena marked International Women’s Day differently by organising a special screening of the controversial film “The Kerala Story 2 Goes Beyond,” framing it as awareness against “love jihad.”
Their aim – to educate and create awareness about “love jihad.”
A pig’s carcass was found inside an Eidgah in Suryapet district during Ramzan, an act local Muslims described as a deliberate provocation. In Hyderabad, a young Muslim man who shared a social media post showing Raja Singh’s face replaced with a pig emoji was made to publicly wash a poster of the former BJP leader. The man, Sheikh Mohammed Yaser from Kidwaipet, was forcibly subjected to the act.
January and March were relatively quieter, with seven and six cases respectively. Siasat.com could document only two cases of Dalit atrocities in the quarter.
The Association for Protection of Civil Rights (APCR), Telangana, says the numbers have been climbing. “Crimes have doubled in the last two years,” said Dr Shaik Osman. “The northern districts of Adilabad, Nirmal, Asifabad and Nizamabad have seen a steady rise of hate against minorities. We have seen two to three cases almost every day.”
Social media is the accelerant, he says. “The use of social media to create fake narratives and its extensive spread to mobilise a crowd are the major ingredients to create a well-spread, charged-up communal hostility.”
The Kamareddy SP’s account of Banswada is worth sitting with. Locals there, he says, generally live in harmony and there are no deep-seated anti-Hindu or anti-Muslim sentiments in the district. But the day of the clash alarmed him.
“The mob included people who had come from outside Banswada to participate. Young minds are slowly being trapped,” he said. He has been posted to Kamareddy for a year. What he saw that day was not the district he knows.
Majlis Bajao Tehreek spokesperson Amjed Ullah Khan, who has consistently flagged hate crimes against Muslims in Telangana and Hyderabad, directed his criticism at successive state governments. “Whether it was K Chandrasekhar Rao or the present Congress government, there are no concrete actions against those who confidently deliver hate speech in open gatherings, or against Muslim traders who are systematically attacked by the Bajrang Dal and Vishva Hindu Parishad for just doing their work,” he told Siasat.com.
Khan stopped short of equating Telangana with the more volatile northern states. “Telangana is not as intense, but there is definitely soft Hindutva being practised by the governments,” he said.
Across a quarter that began in January and ended before the summer heat set in, a pattern held. Incidents sparked by individual acts, inflamed by WhatsApp forwards and outside agitators, and left to smoulder by administrations in no hurry to act.
The Ganga-Jamuna tehzeeb that communities here have long held up as a point of pride looks, quarter by quarter, a little more frayed.
