Pinarayi Vijayan likens Revanth Reddy’s political temperament to Hitler over HYDRAA remark

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Kerala’s Leader of the Opposition and Communist Party of India (Marxist) Polit Bureau member Pinarayi Vijayan on Monday sought to bracket Telangana Chief Minister Revanth Reddy’s political temperament with that of German dictator and Nazi party leader Adolf Hitler.

In a Facebook post, Mr Vijayan seized on Mr Reddy’s purported remark that Adolf Hitler had inspired him to abbreviate the Hyderabad Disaster Response and Asset Protection Agency, an enforcement unit targeting municipal violations, including encroachment and illegal wetland reclamation, as HYDRAA, an indestructible multi-headed mythical lake monster that sprouts two heads for every one severed (Greek lore), to castigate the Congress leader.

Mr Vijayan, who had earlier slammed the Telangana government for allegedly razing urban slums under the “pretext” of vacating illegal encroachments, said HYDRAA was “a fitting acronym” for Mr Reddy’s “bulldozer raj” enforcement unit.

Mr Vijayan said Mr Reddy’s “proud veneration of Adolf Hitler” had betrayed the Congress Chief Minister’s “Sangh Parivar past” and given the game away on the latter’s latent “fascist impulses”.

Mr Vijayan said it was “shameful” that the Congress sheltered a Chief Minister who publicly worshipped the Nazi leader responsible for the death of millions. “Mr Reddy has proudly announced to the world that he wielded an oppressive instrument of State comparable to that of the Nazi era”, he added.

Mr Vijayan noted that the word HYDRAA was a fictional pop-culture construct (associated with a fictitious Nazi terror machine as epitomised in Marvel comics). “Nevertheless, the Congress Chief Minister has given physical form and administrative power to the fascist concept,” he stated.

Mr Vijayan said Mr Reddy’s statement was no slip of the tongue. “His words revealed Congress’s true political nature as evinced during the Emergency when the party’s Central government snuffed out democracy and slaughtered fundamental rights”, Mr Vijayan said.

He said the Congress o