The Man Who Created the Leaders Who Created Telangana — Santhapuri Raghuveer Rao, Freedom Fighter and Senior Journalist
By S. Vamshi Krishna, son
raghuveerraosanthapuri.blogspot.com
Santhapuri Raghuveer Rao was arrested for the first time at the age of sixteen. He was arrested for the second time at thirty-seven. Between those two arrests, he built the Telangana movement. After the second arrest, he kept building it.
He was never corrupt. He was never bought. He was never given what he was owed.
He died on 5 February 2015. His wife Ramadevi was beside him. His son was beside him. That was the room.
The world should know his name. The world should know what he did. The world should know what it cost him.
Born 16 November 1932
At his mother's elder sister's home in Kunoor Village, Warangal, Telangana. His parents were Yashodamma and S. Tirumala Rao. He was the eldest of six children.
He lost his mother to tuberculosis when he was fourteen. He was devastated. But he did not stop. Under the guidance of his paternal uncle, he continued his education and carried forward what she had given him: the belief that a person without learning is a person without ground to stand on.
He attended the 13th Andhra Mahasabha at Kandi, Medak District, as a boy scout volunteer, while studying in Sangareddy. Around him in that gathering were P. Ramachandra Reddy — who would later become Speaker of the AP Assembly — and C. Jagannath Rao — who would later become Deputy Chief Minister of AP. He was a teenager. He was already in the right rooms.
He boycotted high school. He joined the INA border camps at Jayanthi, Krishna District, trained under Captain Ramachandran, and served as a child informer for the liberation movement — carrying intelligence inside enemy-controlled territory.
He was arrested on 8 March 1948. Chanchalguda Central Jail, Hyderabad.
Release appeared unlikely. For a young activist captured under the Nizam's rule, a trial and probable execution was the more likely outcome. He understood this.
He picked up a pen.
In jail, he edited a handwritten Urdu magazine for his fellow prisoners. Payame Nou. New Message. He believed he might not leave that prison alive. His response to that possibility was to write — to pass the message outward through anyone who might carry it, to ensure that the struggle for freedom would continue even if he could not. Such was his thought process at the age of sixteen. He had already understood what the power of the written message could do. He taught himself Urdu from the other prisoners, turning his captivity into a classroom. This was the heroic journalism, practised for the first time in a prison cell, by a sixteen-year-old boy who did not know if he would live to see the morning.
Student Satyagrahis of the Hyderabad Students Union, arrested 8 March 1948. Sri S. Raghuveer Rao is seated second from left. Source: In Jail Beyond Police Action (1948).
He was released on 19 October 1948, following the Police Action — the Indian Army's military operation authorised by Home Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel — which ended the Nizam's rule and integrated Hyderabad State into the Indian Union.
The Journalist
He walked out of Chanchalguda and into the slums of Hyderabad. He took up teaching. When he saw the children of underprivileged families — children who had no other path to education — he gave them what he had: not money, not connections, but knowledge, time, and the conviction that literacy is itself a form of liberation. He taught without fee. He lived among them.
He was a teacher before he was a journalist. That order was not accidental. It defined the purpose behind everything he would later write.
His first professional post was as a teacher at Mufeed Ul Anam Boys High School, Charminar, Hyderabad. He then worked as a Translator at the Samachara Sakha, the government's Information Department, and subsequently as a Clerk at the Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad. He worked multiple positions before journalism, not because he lacked ambition, but because he gave himself wherever he was needed.
One day, driven by his lifelong passion for literature and the written word, he resolved to report the news. He understood that words placed in the hands of the public could do what arms could not — they could make truth visible to everyone at once.
He picked up his pen. He did not put it down until the day his hand could no longer hold it.
He worked at Janashakti, Navashakti, Prajavani, and Samatha before joining Andhra Bhoomi as Chief Sub-Editor, where he served for approximately sixteen years. He served as City Secretary and State Joint Secretary of the Socialist Party. He participated in the Bhoodan movement under Vinoba Bhave and donated his own land. He offered Jeevan Dan at the call of Jayaprakash Narayan.
He then joined Eenadu as News Editor in the early 1980s.
In 1982, he arranged photographs of a public humiliation into an eight-column front page and titled it Bommala Katha. The photographs showed Rajiv Gandhi dismissing the sitting Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh at Hyderabad airport. He placed them on the page in a sequence that told the story without a single word of opinion. That front page woke Telugu self-respect. N.T. Rama Rao formed the Telugu Desam Party. Within seven months, Congress was finished in Andhra Pradesh. The front page was his work. He never claimed it. The record does.
After the Bommala Katha, through his relationship with Ramoji Rao, he was introduced to NTR. He shared his thinking: the abolition of the Zamindari system as a transformative political platform for Andhra Pradesh. NTR took those ideas. As Chief Minister in 1985, NTR implemented the Zamindari abolition, rising to power on the full backing of OBC, ST, and SC communities. My father was not in the limelight for any of it. He wrote the ideas in his diary and gave them to the person who could carry them. Such was his method: a man who measured success by the outcome, not by whether his name was on it.
The Telangana Movement
He carried the Telangana demand across three generations of the movement. He was present at every turning point.
January 1969: Material from Telangana movement archives places him in the Telangana Protection and Conservation Committee formed on 13 January 1969, alongside figures including Katam Laxminarayana and E.V. Padmanabhan. On 22 January 1969, journalists Adiraju Venkateswara Rao and Santhapuri Raghuveer Rao communicated directly to student leaders at Osmania University. He was in the first month of the agitation, not a later arrival.
He co-founded the Telangana Praja Samithi alongside Pratap Kishore, Ananthula Madan Mohan, and other journalist-activists. The TPS was the first organised political demand for a separate Telangana state.
He was arrested and imprisoned in Musheerabad Jail in 1969 for participating in the Separate Telangana Movement.
1971: Marri Chenna Reddy — not a founder of the TPS, but someone who had joined later and worked his way to influence within it — negotiated the TPS into the Congress fold. The founders had no idea this was being planned. Such was the betrayal: it came not from outside the movement, but from inside it, from a man they had trusted. Chenna Reddy's reward was political advancement. He eventually became Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh.
My father was offered a Cabinet Minister post. The price: accept the merger, stay quiet, abandon the demand. He refused. He was airlifted to Rajahmundry Jail.
1972: He contested the Charminar Assembly constituency on a Sampurna Telangana Praja Samithi ticket. He received 5,591 votes — 15.48% — and finished second. His name appeared on a ballot. Thousands of voters in Old City Hyderabad cast their vote for that name. This is documented in election records.
1973–1977: At Prashanthi Nilayam, the spiritual home of Sri Sathya Sai Baba in Puttaparthi, whom he had revered since 1953, he served as Senior Editor of Sanathana Sarathi without salary. He offered free tuition to children. He counselled aspiring journalists at Sri Sathya Sai Higher Learning institutions. He gave what he had and asked nothing in return.
1978: He contested Yakutpura on a Jan Sangh ticket. Ale Narendra and Bandaru Dattatreya — then young activists — campaigned alongside him. He financed it himself. He marginally lost to Salauddin Owaisi of the MIM.
The same Bandaru Dattatreya who campaigned for him in 1978 came to the Amaraveerula Stoopam in February 2015, after his death, to pay his condolences. Thirty-seven years separated those two moments. Such is the arc of a life.
Press meeting with Director General of Andhra Pradesh Sri H.J. Dora, 4 May 1997.
Gaddar addressing the gathering; Prof. Kothapalli Jayashankar and Santhapuri Raghuveer Rao on the dais, 7 March 1999.
1995–2000: He served in the Andhra Pradesh Legislative Assembly as a translator. MLAs and ministers from Congress, TDP, MIM, and the Communist parties all respected him. His voice carried through the speaker system into every corner of that chamber. Precise. Multilingual. Unflappable. Even inside the Assembly, he was searching for the next leader who could carry the Telangana demand forward — identifying those who had conviction beneath their ambition, the rare person who would hold the cause above the career. He asked every new face the same question: are you ready to fight for Telangana?
September 2000: He personally met K. Chandrashekar Rao and invited him to champion the Telangana statehood cause.
This is not family memory. It is on record.
The KPIAS Academy states in official study material:
“Santhapuri Raghuveer Rao, a veteran of the 1969 Telangana movement, encouraged KCR to join the cause in 2000.”
KPIAS Academy official study material.
Telangana State Public Service Commission Group II Government Examination, January 2024, Question 51: “Who invited KCR to the Telangana Movement for the first time?”
Official government answer: Santhapuri Raghuveer Rao.
When Assembly officers told him to stop supporting TRS or be dismissed, he resigned. He co-founded TRS in 2001 and served as its General Secretary from 2002 to 2004. From 2002 to 2006-07, he served as Editor of Naa Telangana weekly magazine, founded and published by Kachiraju Madhusudhan Rao Garu. The magazine was a platform for the renewed statehood demand during the early TRS years.
Integrity Does Not Negotiate
He was offered things his entire life. Every time, he chose Telangana.
In 1971: a Cabinet Minister post. The price — abandon the movement. He chose jail.
In the Assembly years: a parliamentary seat in Delhi. Well-resourced. Authoritative. Far from the ground. He refused. He wanted Hyderabad. He wanted the street level. He wanted to be present where the work was being done, not where the credit was being collected.
When Congress approached him during the 2004-2009 years — when every leader around him seemed to be choosing comfort — he rejected every approach. He said it plainly: siding with Congress for the cause of Telangana would be like kicking a mother's womb. Telangana was his mother. He had fought for her freedom since he was fifteen years old. He would not betray that freedom for position, for security, or for the relief of no longer fighting.
He was offered things his entire life. The price was always the same: compromise. He understood the price. He declined it every time.
He mentored journalists wherever he was — at home, between movements, during the years when no platform offered him a stage. He welcomed anyone who came with a genuine question about the craft of writing, the discipline of reporting, the responsibility of the press. He trained Telugu journalists, Andhra journalists, anyone who sought him out. He showed no partiality. He never measured a student by their politics or their region. He chose intellectual articulation over every other form of influence.
He did not tolerate wilful injustice. His answer to injustice was always the same: articulate it, report it, make it impossible to ignore. From the INA border camps to the Eenadu newsroom to the political offices of Hyderabad, the method never changed. Words. Precision. The refusal to leave the truth buried.
The Evidence
He documented his own life with the same care he brought to documenting everything else.
He wrote his own biography and had it printed on the back cover of his scholarly book, Swatantrodyamam lo Socialistula Patra. He listed his birth, his education path, his journalism career, his jails, his publications. Jails listed the same way jobs are listed. No self-pity. No emphasis. The matter-of-fact listing is itself a form of dignity.
The author biography page from the back cover of Swatantrodyamam lo Socialistula Patra — written by Santhapuri Raghuveer Rao in his own words and printed in his own book.
He submitted a signed bio-data to the Freedom Fighter welfare authority, typed in his own hand, on his own typewriter:
“Founded ‘Telangana Praja Samithi’ along with Pratap Kishore and other fellow Journalists in 1969. Imprisoned in Musheerabad and Rajamundry Jail in 1969 for participating in Separate Telangana Movement.”
Bio-Data Page 1, typed and signed in his own hand.
Bio-Data Page 2, bearing his handwritten signature.
The Bommala Katha editorial decision is documented on camera. Senior Eenadu journalist MVR Sastry names him at the 3:42 mark of this clip. The original front page appears at 6:25.
The invitation to KCR is documented in KPIAS Academy study material and in the 2024 TGPSC Group II Government Examination. Official sources. Not family testimony.
The Hindu covered his death on 6 February 2015. OneIndia Telugu covered it the same day. The TRC Charcha 161 memorial on 14 February 2015 was covered by seven Telugu dailies: Eenadu, Andhra Jyothi, Sakshi, Vartha, Andhra Prabha, Mana Telangana, and Namaste Telangana.
His Wikipedia pages in English and Telugu carry the full biography with citations.
The record is complete. It cannot be undone.
Wherever He Spoke, He Carried the Numbers
He knew them precisely: the share of Telangana's revenue that never returned to Telangana, the government jobs that went elsewhere, the rivers whose water drained into other regions while Telangana's people went without, the taxes collected from a people who received the least in return.
He stated these facts without sentiment. He let the numbers speak. Then he asked the one question that contained the entire argument: why? Why, in a united state, are the people of Telangana the last to receive what is rightfully theirs?
He did not ask it in anger. He asked it the way a journalist asks a question whose answer is already in the record. His reasoning was always backed by evidence — not sentiment, not grievance, but documented fact placed before the people and allowed to speak for itself.
He said it clearly, throughout his life: Telangana is my goal. Telangana is my dream. He wrote it in his diary in 1990 when no one in power was listening. He said it at Osmania University in 2009 when his body was already failing him. The day is not far off, he would say, when the people of Telangana will claim what is theirs.
He believed it the way a journalist believes a documented fact — not as faith, but as the logical conclusion of everything the evidence shows. Such was his conviction: not a sentiment, but a verdict.
And then the day came.
In June 2014, Telangana became a state. He had sown the seed in 1969. He had watered it across five decades through sweat and blood. He had stood at the Jayanthi border camps at sixteen. He had stood at Osmania University at seventy-seven. He had given the movement his health, his career, his land, his income, and his silence when others took the credit. The tree had grown. The tree had borne fruit.
He was not there to eat from it.
He witnessed Telangana from a hospital bed. Less than a year later, on 5 February 2015, he was gone. Such was the final accounting: the man who planted the tree gave his life to water it through his sweat and blood, lived just long enough to see the harvest ripen, and left before a single fruit reached his hand.
The Last Days
From 2012, we were making rounds to the hospital two or three times a month.
Alzheimer's. Extreme hypertension. Diabetes. Thyroid. Joint pains. A paralytic stroke slowed his movements and gradually removed his ability to chew solid food. Doctors at every hospital delivered the same assessment: too many complications, too advanced in age, nothing that treatment could reverse. He had never taken care of his own health. He had invested every resource he possessed into the cause and into others. His body had kept nothing in reserve for itself.
I want to acknowledge Dr. Addluri Gopal Kishan Garu, a close family friend available at any hour of the day or night throughout those years. I called him from hospital corridors at midnight. He told me when to rush and when to wait. Many nights I came home from work and drove my father to hospital in an ambulance. We stayed three, four days at a time. My mother — too old to make those runs — stayed back at home. Dr. Gopal Kishan Garu carried those years alongside us. His name belongs in this record.
In June 2014, my father picked up a newspaper and read it for the last time. He threw it on the floor. He was contemptuous of the standard of the writing. The journalistic instinct that had produced the Bommala Katha front page in 1982 was still intact, still measuring, still judging. His body was failing. His editorial eye had not softened.
That was the last time he read the news.
The following week, after KCR was sworn in as Chief Minister, my father wanted to see him. We went to the Secretariat. We waited in the visitor lobby. KCR was in a hurry. Hundreds of people were waiting. He gave us five seconds.
He saw my father at the visitor room doorway. He stopped. He hugged him briefly. He shook his hand and said: why did you take such efforts to come all the way here? He arranged for his personal vehicle to drop us home.
Five seconds. Then he was gone.
My father could not say what he had come to say. His hearing was ninety percent gone. The journalist, the poet, the man who had wielded language as his primary instrument for sixty years had lost his instrument before the last conversation he needed to have. Whatever he had carried in his heart to say that day, to the man he had invited into the movement, to the Chief Minister of the state he had given his life to build — he could not say it.
We still do not know what it was.
I saw it in his eyes. There were tears — not of joy, not of grief alone, but of a silence that had become too heavy to hold. That understanding was in his face: visible, quiet, complete.
On the night Telangana was declared, I was at NIMS Hospital, Panjagutta, looking after my father.
The whole of Telangana was celebrating in the streets. At 8 o'clock that night, I watched Harish Rao on a horse, waving the TRS flag, pass by in the victory parade. My father was inside, being admitted to hospital. He did not know what night it was.
Such is life.
In September 2014, he lost the grip to hold his pen.
V. Prakash came to our home to visit him. My father was bedridden. V. Prakash placed a pen and a piece of paper in his hand and asked him: what do you want?
My father wrote: Jai Telangana.
The handwriting was a doodle — barely legible, the script of a hand that could no longer form letters with precision. But the words were clear. V. Prakash looked at what he had written. He said: we have achieved Telangana now. KCR is going to do many great things.
After V. Prakash left, I asked my father who had come to visit. He looked at me and said: Pashyam Yadagiri.
He had mistaken his identity and name. His senses were failing. Alzheimer's had taken much of what had made him who he was. But even at that stage — pen barely in hand, letters barely legible — what he wrote was Jai Telangana.. Not his name. Not what he was owed. Not a request for himself or His family. He was born for Telangana. When almost nothing remained, Telangana remained. Such was the man.
He died on 5 February 2015 at DRDO Apollo Hospital, Kanchanbagh, Hyderabad after numerous visits to the hospital and being bedridden for over 7 months. His son was there. His wife Ramadevi was there.
No senior political figure had come to the hospital while he was alive. After his passing, I called upon V. Prakash. He arranged for TRS youth leaders Kotla Vinod and Aleneni Babu Rao to come forward. They organised the last rites. His body was kept at the Amaraveerula Stoopam for an hour. He was then cremated at Saidabad Hindu Crematorium.
KCR received the news within hours. He issued a press statement expressing grief and offered support to the family. That same evening, he left for Delhi on a week-long visit.
What followed was the recognition that had not come while he was alive. Hundreds of leaders. State-sponsored funeral. The Home Minister. Twenty-four to forty-eight hours of scrolling coverage on major news channels. Bandaru Dattatreya — who had campaigned alongside him in 1978 — came to the Amaraveerula Stoopam and offered homage. Three days later, leaders from across party lines gathered and spoke of what he had built.
Condolence gathering, Amaraveerula Stoopam, Gun Park, Hyderabad, 8 February 2015.
Union Minister Bandaru Dattatreya was among those present.
Nine days after his death, the Telangana Resource Centre organised Charcha 161 in his name. Seven Telugu newspapers covered it.
Such was the accounting: silence during suffering, tribute after death. The words arrived when they could no longer reach him.
He died having seen Telangana. He did not die having been seen by Telangana.
What He Left Behind
His poems were concentrated decoction. Every word at full potency. Nothing diluted, nothing decorative. Everything he wrote linked like a chain — one thought pulling the next, each sentence the consequence of the one before it, the argument arriving at its conclusion with the force of something inevitable. He spoke very little. What he spoke felt complete. The entire thought in the fewest possible words. Nothing left out.
He gained his vocabulary by straining a dictionary over a lifetime — not reading it, straining it, extracting what was essential and discarding what was not. He mastered words through countless hours of use, through the discipline of precision, through the refusal to accept the almost-right word when the exactly-right one existed. He taught, simply by doing it, what it means to articulate. People who sat with him left thinking differently. People who read him wrote differently.
He was born to write. Born to edit. Born to spread the written word in Telugu, Urdu, English, and Hindi, through newsrooms and party offices and handwritten prison magazines.
He deserved a much bigger stage.
Give Him His Place
He believed in an open book. His life was one. Anyone who reads it will take from it what their own level of understanding allows. He never forced understanding. He gave knowledge, showed the goal, and left the decision to the reader.
But he had one condition. If you stepped away from honesty, he did not spare you. He removed you from his life cleanly, completely, and without drama. And when people he had built succeeded — and many did — he expected them to remember. Not for his sake alone. Because remembering those who carried you is itself a form of honesty.
None of that happened. He faced the harsh reality of the world as it is, and he chose his principles anyway.
He lost seven children and kept going. He sold ancestral property to keep the Telangana demand alive on a ballot. He returned to Osmania University at seventy-seven, in failing health, to sit in dharnas with students. He shaped two major political formations from the background without ever asking to be acknowledged. He gave his craft to a generation of journalists. He gave his land to a movement. He gave his salary to God's work. He gave his career security to a cause.
Let those who read this take a leaf from his book — to keep ethics alive when everyone around them has abandoned them, to preserve integrity when compromise is the easier path, and to build a character that holds its shape under pressure. That is the standard his life sets. It asks nothing of the reader except the willingness to hold themselves to it.
Then came the wave of leaders. The speeches. The condolences. And then the world went back. The crowds thinned. The news scrolled to the next story.
My mother and I were left with what remained.
I am now on a mission.
The world should know his life. He built the road that others ran on. He did not achieve Telangana single-handedly. Someone else crossed the finish line. But that does not mean he did not run the race.
To the men who gave the speeches and offered the condolences and then went back to their lives: give him a place in the history books. Not for our sake. For the sake of the truth. For the sake of every person who serves without recognition, who builds without credit, who runs without being seen crossing the line.
The record is here. The evidence is documented. The life was lived in full view of those who knew.
Give him his place.
Sri Santhapuri Raghuveer Rao, 16 November 1932 to 5 February 2015.
Freedom fighter. Journalist. Poet.
Co-founder, Telangana Praja Samithi (1969).
Founding Member and General Secretary, Telangana Rashtra Samithi (2001 to 2004).
The man who invited KCR into the Telangana movement and carried the memory of 1969 into the renewed statehood struggle.
Full biography: raghuveerraosanthapuri.blogspot.com
Wikipedia (English): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santhapuri_Raghuveer_Rao
Wikipedia (Telugu): te.wikipedia.org/wiki/సంతపురి_రఘువీర_రావు