The man you just heard is Raja Singh, the Goshamahal MLA and former BJP leader.
But the speech cannot be played in full. It contained remarks about Prophet Muhammad.
Those remarks sparked widespread protests across Hyderabad, led to Raja Singh's arrest, and were so controversial that even the BJP suspended him.
Now, nearly four years later, a Hyderabad court has acquitted him.
This is not an isolated case.
Yet, this isn't the first time he has walked free.
Till September 2022, Raja Singh had been booked in 101 criminal cases. Out of all those cases, he was convicted only once. We reported that in 2022.
In this episode, we have new numbers.
Between December 2024 and the end of 2025, Raja Singh was acquitted in 22 more criminal cases.
Most of these cases were based on speeches made in public, recorded on video, uploaded online, broadcast on television and watched by tens of thousands.
So how do these cases keep collapsing in court?
Is it because Raja Singh has an exceptional legal defence? Or is the police repeatedly failing to build strong cases?
We have looked at more than 25 judgments.
What we found is shocking and lays down the reasons why Raja Singh always manages to get acquitted.
Let me explain.
If you've been following Let Me Explain, you know this is the part where I take a quick detour.
It's easy to report that a politician made a hate speech. It's easy to report on the protests that follow. Most newsrooms stop there.
At The News Minute, we've always believed that's not enough. We follow these cases all the way to the courts because that's where you find out whether the law actually works.
At a time when parts of the media are themselves amplifying hate, we want to do something different: report with evidence and hold institutions accountable.
That kind of journalism is possible only because of viewers like you.
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Let me start with the latest.
On August 22, 2022, Raja Singh uploaded a video on the "Sri Ram Telangana" YouTube channel. He was against comedian Munawar Faruqui's performance in Hyderabad.
In the video, Raja Singh moved beyond criticism of Faruqui and made a series of remarks about Prophet Muhammad and Islam.
In the speech, he referred to a "Hara Book" or "green book", made comments about Prophet Muhammad's marriages, spoke about Muslims eating beef, and said that this was only his first video and that more such videos would follow.
The video triggered widespread protests across Hyderabad, particularly in the Old City.
As tensions escalated, police deployed additional forces to maintain law and order.
Coming just months after Nupur Sharma’s comments in a similar vein, the BJP had no option but to suspend Raja Singh.
On August 23, 2022, Hyderabad Police arrested Raja Singh, and he remained in custody for 77 days.
The criminal case was based on a complaint filed by a man named Khadar Khan. He told the court that the video insulted Islam and hurt the religious sentiments of Muslims.
Khan testified that he downloaded the video, copied it onto a DVD and handed it over to the police. He also submitted a Section 65B certificate, a legal requirement used to authenticate electronic evidence such as videos and digital records.
Another prosecution witness, Javeed Ali Qureshi, told the court that he had watched the same video and that the remarks had deeply hurt the sentiments of Muslims.
The prosecution's case was built around three key pieces of evidence: the DVD submitted by the complainant, the Section 65B certificate and witness testimonies regarding the impact of the speech.
But here's what is surprising.
This was the case that triggered massive protests across Hyderabad, led to Raja Singh's arrest, his suspension from the BJP, and 77 days in jail.
Yet when the case came up for trial, the prosecution could not properly produce the very video on which the entire case was based.
Raja Singh's lawyers pointed out that the original video was never produced before the court. Instead, the complainant had downloaded a copy from an NTV news broadcast and handed that over to the police.
The defence questioned why the Telangana police never obtained and submitted the original video, if there was one.
Because the video came from a television broadcast, it contained pauses and discontinuities. The defence argued that the possibility of edits could not be ruled out.
In other words, the electronic evidence was incomplete.
A video that Raja Singh himself uploaded on his own Youtube channel was not presented properly in court by the Telangana police.
The defence also argued that the prosecution had failed to prove an essential ingredient of Section 295A: that Raja Singh had acted with deliberate and malicious intent to outrage religious feelings.
His lawyers referred to verses from the Quran and argued that his remarks were based on those texts, rather than being fabricated insults.
Ultimately, Raja Singh was acquitted.
And this is a pattern we have seen play out many times before.
One of the most illustrative examples is a case filed in 2016 by Hyderabad-based activist Mohammed Irfan Quadri. Quadri approached the police over a series of speeches made by Raja Singh and uploaded on YouTube.
He specifically cited three videos from 2015 and 2016. In one of those speeches, Raja Singh warned Muslims that if they slaughtered cows, they would be slaughtered in the same way.
The case took nearly five years to reach a conclusion. In December 2021, a Special Court acquitted Raja Singh.
In this case too, the police failed to properly record and authenticate the electronic evidence.
The videos referred to in the complaint had been downloaded and copied onto a CD. But the procedures required for handling electronic evidence had not been followed correctly.
Second, the police had not obtained the government's approval before prosecuting the MLA.
This approval is mandatory under Section 196 of the Code of Criminal Procedure for certain offenses
There are several cases against Raja Singh which have fallen apart simply because the police did not get the sanction to prosecute.
My colleague Anjana Meenakshi looked at 22 cases in which Raja Singh was acquitted from December 2024 to December 2025. A majority of the cases were for hate speech and inciting communities.
The most common reason for acquittal was the prosecution's inability to show that anyone had actually been affected by the speech.
In 15 cases, courts noted that there were no complaints from members of the community allegedly targeted by the remarks. Basically, no evidence that religious sentiments had in fact been hurt.
In 14 cases, prosecution failed to prove to courts that the speech had led to communal tension, public disorder, or a threat to peace.
Digital evidence was another recurring weak spot.
In 11 cases, courts said the mandatory Section 65B certificates needed to verify videos and other electronic evidence were defective.
In eight cases, electronic evidence was missing, unavailable, or blank when produced in court.
In 10 cases, investigators failed to obtain forensic analysis of the recordings.
In nine cases, independent witnesses turned hostile. Is that really surprising? The joke in Hyderabad is that even Narendra Modi cannot defeat Raja Singh in Goshamahal.
In seven cases, judges refused to accept that certain words, gestures, or references automatically targeted a particular religious community without clear evidence.
A handful of acquittals turned on technical legal grounds. In one case, the court held that an elected representative's criticism of the government and police was protected speech.
Advocate K. Karuna Sagar, who represented Raja Singh in most of his cases, has openly stated that his strategy was often built around identifying procedural lapses committed by investigators.
In 2010, Raja Singh and others were accused of leading a mob that attacked a CRPF officer, vandalised police property, set fire to a mosque, damaged another mosque, and burned a shop during communal violence.
The case eventually came up for trial more than a decade later.
By then, the main complainant told the court that he did not know anything about the case and had merely signed a blank paper at the request of police officers. The prosecution declared him hostile. Several other witnesses also failed to support the prosecution's version of events.
Police witnesses confirmed that violence had taken place but could not identify those responsible. One police constable testified that a mob of around 300 people had pelted stones, but he could not identify any member of the crowd.
The court finally acquitted everyone including Raja Singh
Two other cases registered the same day at Afzalgunj police station concerning attacks on mosques followed a similar trajectory.
Look at what’s actually breaking these cases. It’s not alibis or contradicted witnesses or any new evidence in Raja Singh’s favour.
It’s the same failures over and over, case after case. Up to 22 acquittals in just a year, and not one of them fell apart because Raja Singh proved his innocence. They fell apart because not enough was done to prove his guilt.
Yesterday, when I spoke to Raja Singh’s lawyer, he said most of the cases were filed to just satisfy public sentiment. And after that, the police failed in doing even the basics in building a case.
And that’s what the court records also show.
The speeches were recorded. The complaints were filed. FIRs were registered. In some cases, protests broke out and arrests were made. Yet when the cases finally reached court, the prosecution often failed at the most basic task: proving its own case.
For Raja Singh, those failures have translated into acquittal after acquittal.
For the police and the prosecution, they raise an uncomfortable question: if even high-profile cases with videos, witnesses and public attention cannot survive in court, then what exactly is going wrong?
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Produced by Megha Mukundan, script by Pooja Prasanna, Edit by Nikhil Sekhar ET, Camera by Ajay R