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In August 2022, AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi was compelled to appeal for peace. The previous day, hundreds of Muslims had poured out into the streets of Hyderabad.
“Gustaq e nabi ki ek saza, sar tann se juda,” the crowd chanted. (‘There is only one punishment for audaciously insulting the Prophet, severe head from body.’)
“I condemn the call for violence,” Asaduddin said on August 23, 2022. “Our fight should be within the ambit of the law. I am not in agreement with the language used. I want to tell protesters that they cannot take the law into their own hands.”
The outpouring on Hyderabad’s streets was not unprompted. T Raja Singh, the Goshamahal MLA and then a leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), had made comments on Prophet Muhammad, Islam’s final Prophet. In response, a deeply offended community protested, particularly in the Old City. Raja Singh was arrested for his comments and subsequently granted bail 77 days later.
On June 30, 2026, Raja Singh was acquitted in the very case that had dominated headlines four years earlier.
A prominent face of Hindutva politics in Telangana, Raja Singh has built his political career on speeches routinely steeped in Islamophobia. Over the years, several FIRs have been registered against him, yet he has almost never been convicted.
Whether Raja Singh’s speech constituted hate speech and if it was punishable at all is a different question, but a closer examination of court records reveals that these cases fell apart because of weak chargesheets, shoddy investigations, and incomplete technical evidences
TNM had reported in 2022 that while Hyderabad police had registered at least 101 cases against Raja Singh till then, he was only convicted in one case and acquitted in at least 33 cases at that time. In this story, we examined 22 more acquittals and the patterns they reveal.
The case that shook Hyderabad and still ended in acquittal
No speech of the three-time MLA received as much attention as the one against the Prophet.
On the night of August 22, 2022, as the demonstrations against Raja Singh swelled, police deployed additional personnel across sensitive areas and detained several protesters.
Raja Singh’s remarks came in a video uploaded to his YouTube channel, Sri Ram Telangana, titled ‘Faruqui K Aaka Ka Itihaas Suniye’ (Listen to the history of Faruqui’s master). The master in question was a snide reference to Prophet Muhammad.
The immediate context was comedian Munawar Faruqui’s proposed performance in Hyderabad. Faruqui had long been a target of Hindu right-wing groups, who accused him of mocking Hindu deities. Following the accusation, Munawar tendered an apology.
In his video, Raja Singh quickly moved beyond criticism of the comedian and launched into a discussion of Prophet Muhammad, making a series of comments about the Prophet’s life, including references to his marriages and Islamic religious texts.
