IN GRAINY FOOTAGE, and a tearful sombre Telugu, Mohammed Khadeer Khan described his ordeal. “For two hours, they hung me upside down and beat me. They beat me with belts, then with sticks.” A few days before Khan’s tearful video went viral, a case of jewellery theft, caught on CCTV cameras, had occurred in Medak, a town in northern Telangana. Medak Police had used unclear footage to claim that Khan was the thief, promptly tracing him down to a Hyderabad suburb and taking him into custody.
For five days, the Medak police tortured Khan, before finding, through his call data records, that he had not been at the site of the crime and that their criminal profiling algorithm, had malfunctioned. He was taken to hospital, where he recorded the viral video. He died shortly after, from his wounds. Khan’s death, on 16 February this year, became what is likely the first case of custodial killing caused by an algorithm.
While Khan’s death rang alarm bells for privacy activists and human-rights organisations, the rapid digitisation of every aspect of the Telangana government is not something the ruling Bharat Rashtra Samithi is vary of in the slightest. To the contrary, through its last decade in power, digitisation has become the party’s primary pitch to the people of India’s youngest state. Hyderabad’s rapidly growing IT sector, coupled with investment from the world’s largest companies, is something the scion of this inching technocracy and Telangana’s minister of information technology, Kalvakuntla Taraka Rama Rao leverages as his main argument in his party’s underdog fight against the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress. Its visible in his every public speech, and in his Twitter spats. Just months before Khan’s death, KTR, as he popularly known, responded on Twitter to a start-up director angry with the state of Bengaluru’s infrastructure by asking him to pack his bags and “move to Hyderabad, we have better physical infrastructure, and equally good social infrastructure.” He said that his state which had only three mantras, “innovation, infrastructure and inclusive growth.”
The last of those mantras is a crucial one for Telangana. Much of KTR’s polished advertising would make Telangana seem like a Singapore with spicier food. But Telangana achieved statehood a mere ten years ago, primarily for its social and economic backwardness. Mass unemployment, a lack of irrigation and poor government investment were so widespread in the region that, in the early 2000s, the speaker of Andhra Pradesh’s assembly had banned the word “Telangana,” instead asking legislators to replace it with “backward areas.” A decade after this, buoyed by what was perhaps one of the largest people’s movements in modern Indian history, Telangana attained statehood under K Chandrashekhar Rao—KTR’s father—a late upper-caste entrant to a much older movement primarily fought on the shoulders of Telangana’s backward classes, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. KCR’s manifesto for the new state was a reaffirmation of the movement’s three key demands: neellu, nidhulu, niyamakalu—water, resources, and appointments. Under KCR, the BRS came to power in the first elections in the new state, in 2013, and returned again in 2018. As Telangana enters its tenth year under the BRS, and at the close of KCR’s two terms as chief minister, amid a fractious election, how has the BRS fared in fulfilling these promises?