A Lion Stirs the Forest

Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan 

How a film star’s electoral upset in Tamil Nadu has ignited fresh hope—and hard questions—among Telangana’s long-marginalised Backward Classes

There is a saying, attributed to no particular wit yet beloved of south Indian political romantics, that a lion is always a lion—however many jackals and other animals crowd the forest, there will be only one king. Vijay, the Tamil film star who last month shattered sixty years of Dravidian-party dominance in Tamil Nadu, is being invoked across the Deccan plateau as precisely that lion. The question animating activist meetings and WhatsApp forums from Warangal to Hyderabad is whether his improbable triumph contains a lesson—or even a blueprint—for the Backward Classes (BC) movement of Telangana.

T. Chiranjeevulu, a retired Indian Administrative Service officer who chairs the BC Intellectuals Forum in Hyderabad, has been among the most vocal in drawing the parallel. Speaking to an audience of activists and young professionals, he argued that Vijay’s victory was not merely a celebrity spectacle but a political event with structural significance—one that dismantled several comfortable assumptions about what it takes to win power in contemporary India.

“In 76 years of statehood, not a single chief minister has come from the Backward Classes—a community that makes up 56 percent of the population.”

Sixty Years of Dravidian Rule, and Its Lessons

Vijay’s achievement deserves to be stated plainly. He had no political lineage, no prior electoral experience, and the active hostility of the established Dravidian parties whose combined grip on Tamil Nadu had held since the 1960s. He spent nothing resembling the sums customarily associated with southern Indian electioneering. Print and television media were largely unfriendly or indifferent. He never visited several districts at all. And yet he won.

The mechanism was social media and a generation that had grown weary of clientelism dressed in ideological clothing. Youth in Tamil Nadu, much like their counterparts in Telangana, want employment, economic security, transparent governance, and social justice delivered with accountability. Vijay gave them a mirror for those aspirations. Mr Chiranjeevulu argues that this is precisely the template the BC movement must study: not the glamour, but the grammar.

An Arithmetic of Exclusion

The political history of what is now Telangana—counting both its earlier incarnation as part of united Andhra Pradesh and its brief separate existence since 2014—is a history of remarkable caste concentration at the apex of power. Since 1950, twenty individuals have held the office of chief minister across Hyderabad State, united Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana. The arithmetic is striking and, to the BC movement, damning.

Eleven of those twenty were Reddys, who governed for a cumulative 39 years. Three Kammas held power for nearly fifteen years. Two Velamas administered the state for almost fourteen years. Brahmins, in two stints, ruled for five years and three months. A single Vaishya served for just over a year. Dalit leaders—represented only by the late Damodaram Sanjeevaiah—held the office for two years and two months. The Scheduled Tribes have never produced a chief minister at all.

The Backward Classes—formally defined as a socially and educationally disadvantaged group, comprising according to government surveys 56.33 percent of Telangana’s population—have never produced a chief minister. Not a single day in 76 years of statehood. The three parties that have alternated in power—the Congress, the Telugu Desam Party, and the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (now Telangana unit of the Congress government)—have between them produced this record. Mr Chiranjeevulu’s indictment is unsparing: all three, he argues, are structurally anti-BC.

Unemployment, Youth, and the Politics of Aspiration

The BC movement’s structural grievance is amplified by a contemporary one. According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey, Telangana’s unemployment rate stands at 5 percent—well above the national average of 3.1 percent. One in four young people in the state is without work. The demographic math is simultaneously the movement’s greatest challenge and its most potent resource. The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies estimates that between 18 and 40 years of age, Telangana is home to approximately 15 million young people.

This is the generation Mr Chiranjeevulu calls the “Zanzad generation”—a Telugu coinage for those who are educated, frustrated, and searching for political expression that matches their scale of ambition. They do not want patronage. They want structural change: jobs created by accountable governance, not distributed by the discretion of caste patrons. It is in this desire, he argues, that the Tamil Nadu lesson becomes applicable. Vijay won not because he promised more of the same, but because he embodied a rejection of it.

Money, Media, and the Myth of Electoral Inevitability

One of the most subversive implications of Vijay’s victory, for anyone inclined to accept the conventional wisdom of Indian electoral politics, is its challenge to the doctrine of money power. The received wisdom holds that elections in southern India in particular are won through the distribution of cash, liquor, and material inducements—that voters are effectively purchased rather than persuaded. Vijay did not operate on this model, and he won. Mr Chiranjeevulu draws the obvious inference: the primacy of money in elections is, at least partly, a self-serving myth perpetuated by those who have money.

Media power tells a similar story. Vijay received no meaningful support from Tamil Nadu’s print or television establishments, which were largely aligned with the incumbent parties. He reached voters through social media alone—through short videos, local organisers, and the organic spread of political content among young people who distrust television precisely because they recognise its proprietors. For a BC movement that lacks both the capital to buy media and the historical access to it, this is significant: the tools of mobilisation have changed, and the new tools are cheap.

The Forest and Its Claimants

The deeper argument being made by Mr Chiranjeevulu and the BC Intellectuals Forum is not merely electoral. It is about the ownership of the state. In Telangana today, the commanding heights of the economy—pharmaceuticals, cinema, manufacturing, services—are occupied overwhelmingly by members of the same three or four castes that have monopolised political power. BCs, Scheduled Castes, and Scheduled Tribes are, as Mr Chiranjeevulu puts it with blunt statistical confidence, invisible: not in business, not in the bureaucracy’s senior ranks, not in the professions. The political and economic exclusions are mutually reinforcing.

The governing parties, in this account, have not merely failed to address this exclusion—they have perpetuated it, using public resources and public debt to enrich their caste constituencies while distributing just enough welfare to forestall organised resistance. The resources of Telangana—water, land, mineral rights, and government contracts—have been allocated in ways that compound the advantage of the already advantaged.

Mr Chiranjeevulu is not advocating caste reservation alone, though he supports its expansion. His argument is more fundamental: that without political power, no other form of inclusion is durable. Control of the state is the condition for everything else—economic policy, educational investment, bureaucratic appointments, and the allocation of development spending. The BC movement must, therefore, aim not merely for representation within the existing power structure but for its transformation.

What Must Be Done

The practical prescription emerging from the BC Intellectuals Forum is threefold. First, the movement must build its own digital infrastructure, reaching young people on the platforms where they consume political information rather than waiting for television coverage that will never come. Second, it must recruit from the 15 million strong youth cohort not as passive supporters but as organisers—people who understand that the structural change they want for themselves requires the political project Mr Chiranjeevulu is describing. Third, it must contest the next state elections with the explicit goal of state power, not coalition leverage.

Mr Chiranjeevulu is careful to note his own disinterestedness. He is a retired bureaucrat with no electoral ambitions and no party affiliation. He came to the movement, he says, because the injustice had become impossible to observe without response—a sentiment that is either admirable civic commitment or the self-presentation of a man who has, in fact, very definite political ideas. The distinction may matter less than it appears. What the movement needs, he argues, is intellectual clarity and organisational persistence, not charismatic figureheads.

Victory Is Not a Metaphor

The Vijay analogy has its limits. Tamil Nadu is not Telangana. A film star with pan-state recognition is not easily replicated. The Dravidian parties, for all their longevity, had specific vulnerabilities that the Congress-BRS duopoly in Telangana does not perfectly mirror. And the BC movement itself is heterogeneous—encompassing hundreds of communities with divergent economic interests and varying degrees of political organisation.

But the structural reading—that entrenched elite parties can be displaced by movements that understand what a new generation wants, that money and mainstream media are less decisive than the old parties believe, and that the aspirations of a numerically dominant but politically invisible majority are a latent electoral force of enormous potential—is more transferable than the surface story.

The martyrs of the Telangana movement, whose sacrifices secured the state its separate existence in 2014, did not, in the telling of BC activists, intend to deliver power to the same castes that had always held it. The question now is whether those aspirations—unrealised for over a decade—can find the organisational form to redeem them. Mr Chiranjeevulu believes they can. Whether the lion he envisions will actually emerge from the forest remains, for now, a matter of faith, demographics, and the patience of the dispossessed. ■

 This article is compiled and elaborated from remarks delivered by T. Chiranjeevulu, retired IAS officer and Chairman, BC Intellectuals Forum, Hyderabad, on the implications of Vijay’s Tamil Nadu electoral victory for the Backward Classes movement in Telangana.