Hyderabad: Congress MLC Chintapandu Naveen alias Teenmar Mallanna held a protest near KBR Park (Kasu Brahmananda Reddy National Park) on Saturday, June 21, urging the state government to rename the park after Telangana ideologue Professor Kothapalli Jayashankar.
“Very soon, other parks in Hyderabad will be renamed after the real heroes, people from the backward classes and the marginalised sections, who played a crucial role in the Telangana statehood movement,” he claimed.
Kasu Brahmananda Reddy was the chief minister of the undivided Andhra Pradesh during the 1969 Telangana movement, a period during which 369 Telangana activists were killed in police firing. He held office from February 29, 1964, to September 30, 1971.
Professor Jayashankar played a key role in the 1969 Telangana movement and was one of the few who kept its spirit alive until the final phase of the struggle, which lasted from 1995 to 2014.
This is not the first time demands to rename the KBR Park have emerged. In December 2009, the then Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS, now BRS) minorities wing leader and former home minister Mohd Mahmood Ali defaced the statue of the former chief minister of undivided Andhra Pradesh at the park and called him a ‘traitor.’ Back then, he demanded to rename the park as ‘Asaf Jahi Park.’
The KBR Park land once belonged to the Nizams of Hyderabad, before it was taken over by the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh state government.
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