HYDERABAD: Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy has hit back at his Kerala counterpart Pinarayi Vijayan after the latter’s criticism of the performance of the Congress government in Telangana.
Revanth, in a statement on Monday, said: “Kerala is struggling with brain drain, industrial stagnation and a welfare model increasingly dependent on Gulf remittances. It deserves a better government than the one that held power for 10 years and has run out of new answers. The people of Kerala deserve the Congress model.”
Revanth said: “I will be happy to visit Thiruvananthapuram on April 7 and share our data with you directly — and also hear your views — in a positive, fact-based discussion.”
Countering Revanth’s allegations during his recent election campaign in Kerala, Vijayan, in a post on a social media platform, said that his Telangana counterpart was misinformed and accused him of ridiculing Kerala and its people while concealing the weaknesses of his own state.
“By conveniently ignoring the bulldozing of the homes of the poor in his own state, he appears to lecture Kerala on social progress and public welfare. Clearly, he has been seriously misinformed by someone,” said Vijayan, welcoming Revanth to Kerala to learn about its welfare model.
Revanth rebutted point by point the claims of Vijayan. He said: “Your data is outdated. You are speaking of the past. The statistics that you cite are from the NITI Aayog SDG Index 2023–24 — a period representing the tail-end of a disastrous decade for Telangana, when the combined onslaught of the BJP at the Centre and the BRS in the state had pushed our people to an all-time low. That era ended in December 2023. You are measuring our recovery by data that predates our government.
More mistakenly, you wrote that by late 2025, Kerala is set to become the first state in the country to completely eradicate extreme poverty. We are now in April 2026. You are speaking of the past in the future tense. Did it happen? Or is it, like many LDF promises, still a work in progress?”
TG inherited poverty created by BRS, BJP: Revanth
Revanth said that Kerala’s number one rank in NITI Aayog’s SDG Index 2023–24 and its low poverty rate were due to the efforts of previous Congress governments.
He said: “We inherited the poverty that the BRS and BJP created together. The question is not where you are after 60 years, but how fast we are closing the gap in 28 months of Congress rule in Telangana.”
The chief minister further said: “You called the nexus between you and the BJP absurd and attacked the Congress as the BJP’s ‘B-Team’. But I merely echoed what the common people of Kerala told me repeatedly during my campaign. The 2020 Kerala gold smuggling case — in which 30 kg of gold was seized from diplomatic baggage at Thiruvananthapuram airport — saw your own principal secretary M Sivasankar arrested by the ED, suspended and charged.
The key accused Swapna Suresh named your CM’s office directly before investigators. And yet, despite the ED registering an ECIR and conducting searches in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, and despite the CBI itself expressing readiness to investigate the Sabarimala case to the Kerala High Court, the CBI has not been ordered by Delhi to pursue the Kerala CM’s office link. The Gandhi family, by contrast, is hounded daily.”
Revanth alleged that Kerala’s most precious resource — its young and talented people — is leaving the state.
“Approximately 3.5 million Keralites work abroad, overwhelmingly in the Gulf. Their remittances, estimated at over `1.5 lakh crore annually, are not a sign of opportunity; they are a sign of its absence. Even during conflict scenarios in the Middle East, Malayali workers cannot return home because there are no comparable jobs in Kerala. A 10-year LDF tenure has not meaningfully reversed this,” he said.
Alleging that there is industrial stagnation in Kerala, he said: “Kerala receives a tiny fraction of India’s FDI. The state’s manufacturing sector has not scaled. ‘Sustainable development’ without industrial investment simply means our best minds leave. A welfare model funded by diaspora remittances is structurally fragile.”