Setting new goals for fans on how to express their love and adoration for movie stars, TRS activists of Shayampeta village felicitate the Telangana Assembly Speaker with a milk abhishekam.
Village residents and TRS activists of Shayampeta recreated a scene from the Oke Okkadu (Mudhalvan in Tamil) movie and poured milk on Speaker Madhusudhana Chary to honour him for inaugurating the new gram panchayat office in the village which falls under Warangal district.
The Telangana government recently passed the Panchayat Raj Act, which will convert more than 4,000 villages into new gram panchayats, including 1,500 tribal hamlets. Overwhelmed with the development, local TRS leaders wanted to surprise Speaker Madhusudhana Chary.
Chanting slogans of ‘Jai Telangana’, the activists and locals took turns and poured milk on the Speaker, even as he protested feebly.
While pouring milk on posters and cut-outs of celebrities is quite common, milk abhishekam for a living person is certainly intriguing.
Public ablution with pots of milk is of #Telangana assembly Speaker Madhusudanachary at his constituency Bhupalapally for creating 4320 new #grampanchayat including 1500 tribal taking total number to 12k; why do we need servile thanksgiving for what is a democratic right?? @ndtv pic.twitter.com/Y2bCgdE43p
— Uma Sudhir (@umasudhir) March 31, 2018
The Speaker is known to gel well with the locals, who see him as an endearing leader striving to develop their constituency.
Chary is known to have taken up many unconventional decisions and programmes for the welfare of his constituency. To learn their problems first hand, he regularly does the ‘Palle Nidra’ programme in his district, Bhupalapally, where he stays a night with the village residents to learn their experiences for himself.
However, the milk abhishekam row did not go down well with opposition parties and as well as netizens who slammed the act.
Speaking to TNM, Congress spokesperson Dasoju Sravan Kumar said, “This is a new low in politics. When pouring milk on statues itself is a ridiculous waste of resources, how can they do this?”
He added, “This is also against the spirit of democracy. The supposed upliftment of tribals by TRS is a false claim… the CAG report has exposed the poor utilisation of ST sub-plan funds.”
Lashing out at the bizarre act, he said the TRS government did not do anything other than what it is responsible for as a lawmaker, so there was no need to worship politicians, which only harms democracy.