Hyderabad: Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) leader Shaik Abdullah Sohail attacked the Congress government on Thursday, August 28, for registering a First Information Report (FIR) against some Muslims who staged a peaceful protest in the Jubilee Hills constituency demanding land for a graveyard.
Sohail said the move is an “act of intimidation, designed to silence a genuine demand that has been pending for years”. The BRS leader blamed Telangana chief minister A Revanth Reddy for “unleashing the police on the community” and said that the case is not a routine law-and-order response. He stated that the FIR “reflected a deliberate and communal mindset”.
In a media statement, the BRS leader alleged that the Congress government in Telangana is “communal thinking”. “Instead of fulfilling a just demand, the Congress regime is treating Muslims as criminals for seeking a piece of land where they can bury their loved ones with dignity,” he said in a media statement on Thursday.
According to Sohail, the FIR, registered in crime no. 529/2025 at the Borabanda Police Station and placed before the Hon’ble III Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate at Nampally, was based on a complaint from a police constable who admitted that Friday prayers outside Tawhid Masjid had caused no obstruction.
“Yet, when around 200 people briefly held placards and raised slogans demanding graveyard land after Namaz on August 22, the police claimed they blocked the road and disrupted traffic. The case named a few individuals, including Maqram, Javeed, Khader, Yakub, Munir Khan and Sharif, and invoked multiple provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS),” added his release.
The BRS leader said that by “piling such minor and bailable sections on peaceful protesters”, the state government is using law “as a weapon of fear”. He reminded that Muslims in Jubilee Hills have been struggling for graveyard land for years, and the previous BRS government had already initiated steps to resolve the issue, added his release.
The BRS leader demanded the immediate withdrawal of the FIR and the early allocation of land for a Muslim graveyard in Jubilee Hills. “This is not a favour but a basic right. Denial of burial space is denial of humanity. The Chief Minister should stop replicating the anti-Muslim model of BJP governments and act like the head of a state that respects all communities. If not, history will remember Revanth Reddy not as a Congress leader, but as the man who converted Congress into ‘CongRSS’,” Sohail said.
