How the Telugu states’ most popular sweet shop financed the Ram Janmabhoomi movement

In this series, we travel back to the turbulent 1990s to see what impact the Ram Janmabhoomi movement had on south India. We found that Karnataka was as enthusiastic then as it is now about militant Hindutva. But the other states in the region weren’t entirely immune to the flames of hate.A sweets business tycoon from the Telugu states, who was also the all-India treasurer of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) at the time, used his wealth to send kar sevaks to Ayodhya for the demolition of the Babri Masjid and also to finance the Ayodhya legal dispute. He is among the few men from south India credited with actively championing the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in court. Most Telugu people are familiar with his portrait in the side profile on display boards of the numerous branches of his sweet shop chain. His face, rather like Colonel Sanders’ photo on the KFC logo, is also sometimes plastered on the sweet boxes, which are shipped internationally..G Pulla Reddy, founder of G Pulla Reddy Pure Ghee Sweets, is a household name in the Telugu states. During the Ayodhya Babri Masjid dispute – one of India’s most momentous legal fights – when the VHP needed funds to continue the legal battle, it often turned to Pulla Reddy, who is said to have funnelled lakhs of rupees into the movement. Through the 1990s and 2000s, the elderly man associated with festive occasions in the Telugu states was also one of the biggest benefactors of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement.Sweet maker, business tycoon, and Ram Janmabhoomi movement’s money manGunampalli Pulla Reddy started his first sweet shop in Kurnool in 1948 with his uncle’s help, and by 1970, became the official sweet supplier to the Raj Bhavan in Hyderabad. He has since presented his sweets to political leaders such as former Prime Ministers Morarji Desai and Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Former Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister and Telugu Desam Party founder NT Rama Rao too is said to have enjoyed the ‘jeedipappu pakam’ (a sweet made of cashewnuts) from Pulla Reddy Sweets. “NTR once told my father that if one is ever granted a dying wish, one must ask for our sweets,” Pulla Reddy’s son Raghava Reddy said in an interview with Vanitha TV.Although Pulla Reddy never participated in active politics, he was initially an RSS leader who went on to become VHP’s AP president in 1980, and its all-India treasurer in 1990, around the same period that VHP indirectly became a party to the dispute by having its associates represent the deity who eventually gained custody of the site. VHP, a right-wing organisation formed to “organise Hindu society” and “protect Hindu dharma,” had declared a campaign for a Ram temple to be built at the site where Babri Masjid was located, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) became the campaign’s political face.As a successful businessman, Pulla Reddy took pride in setting up educational institutions and doing other ‘charitable’ work. “It’s the rich and the educated who must work hard for the nation to prosper. It’s these two that must run the country. What can labourers do? They work for their daily sustenance,” he once told ETV..Until he died in 2007, Pulla Reddy continued to head the AP unit of the VHP and also remained its treasurer. While Ale Narendra, an RSS man who was later elected as MP from both BJP and TRS, played a key role in mobilising Telugu kar sevaks to travel to Ayodhya, Pulla Reddy heavily financed the Ram Janmabhoomi movement.Former Telangana VHP president M Rama Raju recalled that Pulla Reddy was the biggest benefactor of the movement from the Telugu states, particularly when it came to legal fees. A story often recounted by right-wing groups on social media is that at one point, when the legal fees were mounting, then international working president of VHP Ashok Singhal visited Pulla Reddy saying he needed Rs 25 lakh. Pulla Reddy is said to have immediately handed over Rs 2 lakh, and promised to furnish another Rs 10 lakh the same day. Rama Raju, who was a member of the RSS at the time of the Babri Masjid demolition and joined the VHP in the mid-1990s, confirmed that this was true. “It wasn’t just on one occasion. Throughout the ‘90s until he passed away, Pulla Reddy must have easily contributed about Rs 2 lakh every month for the movement,” Rama Raju told TNM..“The court needed many historical and religious texts to be translated from Persian and Sanskrit. There were thousands of pages and the translation costs ran into lakhs. He was always ready to bear the costs and at one point, even offered to pledge his house in Errum Manzil and his wife Narayanamma’s jewellery, saying the fight for dharma shouldn’t stop,” Rama Raju said. While the Supreme Court in its 2019 Ayodhya verdict said it was cautious of making deductions based on historical texts, it did refer to many translated texts in its judgement.Apart from Pulla Reddy, senior Supreme Court lawyer and former Attorney General of India K Parasaran, and former Regional Director (North) of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) KK Muhammed are other south Indians who played important roles in the Ayodhya legal dispute. Parasaran successfully fought the Ayodhya dispute on behalf of the Hindu parties in the Supreme Court. He has since been appointed to lead the 15-member Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust, set up by the Union government. Muhammed was one of the archaeologists involved in the excavation of the Babri Masjid site in 1990, who said that a Ram temple existed there before the mosque. While Muhammed, who retired in 2012, has criticised the BJP government for weakening the ASI and also called the Ram Mandir a political project of the party, he has also suggested that Muslims must voluntarily hand over other contested sites in Uttar Pradesh such as the Gyanvapi Mosque and the Shahi Idgah complex in Mathura, without a legal battle like in Ayodhya. In 1991, Pulla Reddy received a ‘Danaguna Bhushana’ award for his ‘charity’ work from the Udupi Pejawara Math, whose seer at the time, Vishveshwara Theertha Swami, spearheaded the Ram Mandir movement. Right-wing groups even refer to Pulla Reddy as a “modern day Bhamashah.” Bhamashah was an aide of Mewar’s ruler, Maharana Pratap Singh, who is said to have financed his battle against the Mughals in the 16th century.Read: How Karnataka and a seer from Udupi were at the heart of Ram Janmabhoomi movement.BJP leader Dasari Mallesh, a kar sevak present in Ayodhya when a Hindu mob demolished the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992, recalled that Pulla Reddy had even paid for the train tickets and meals of kar sevaks who couldn’t afford the trip.Pulla Reddy and his family’s association with Hindutva politics continued till his death and beyond. His son Raghava Reddy, who has taken over the sweets business, became VHP’s international president in 2011. He remained a loyalist of Pravin Togadia, the organisation’s former working president and an aggressive proponent of the Ram Mandir movement.Retail outlets of G Pulla Reddy Sweets, spread across the Telugu states, have been seen placing donation boxes for a Hindu Dharma Raksha Fund of the VHP towards “National (Hindu) Unity”, “stopping conversions” and other such objectives. The VHP, on the other hand, carries advertisements of Pulla Reddy Sweets in its publications on topics such as the Ram Janmabhoomi movement..How VHP’s kar seva stoked communal flames in HyderabadHyderabad’s first major communal riot took place in 1978, after Congress leader Marri Chenna Reddy became CM, amid protests against the rape of a Muslim woman named Ramizabee and her husband’s death at a police station. Seven years later, in 1985, Pulla Reddy became president of the Bhagyanagar Ganesh Utsav Samithi, which popularised the procession of the tallest Ganesh idol in Hyderabad’s Khairatabad. Centralised Ganesh Chaturthi processions started seeing mass participation in Hyderabad in the 1970s. Congress leader Marri Chenna Reddy, who began his first tenure as Chief Minister in 1978, gave in to the RSS’s demands to make the Ganesh processions even more popular. He became the first CM to make an address at these events. In subsequent years, communal riots became “almost an annual feature in Hyderabad until 1984 when Telugu Desam came to power,” writes Asghar Ali Engineer, an academic and activist known for his work on communalism. He says this was because TDP had both the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM)’s and BJP’s support. The respite from communal tensions lasted the six years that TDP was in power, from 1983 to 1989. On October 4, 1990, LK Advani’s Somnath-Ayodhya Ram Rath Yatra entered undivided Andhra Pradesh at Mallapur. It passed through Hyderabad and a few other places in present-day Telangana including Toopran, Adilabad, Ramayanpet, Armoor, and Nirmal. Advani addressed public meetings at Kamareddy, Nizamabad, Medak, Chegunta, and Bhiknoor – places where the BJP has continued to have a strong presence to date. “No power in the country can stall the construction of the Ram temple at Ayodhya,” he said at one of the meetings. Days later, when Advani was arrested in Bihar, Hyderabad witnessed minor riots allegedly stoked by BJP.Also read: How 1500 Dalits converting to Islam in a TN village set the stage for Ram Rath Yatra.When the yatra culminated in Ayodhya on October 30, nearly 14,000 kar sevaks from AP were present there, out of which about 9,000 were from present-day Telangana.A month later, Hyderabad witnessed serious communal riots. About 200 to 300 people are estimated to have died in the violence that escalated on December 7, 1990, and continued for about a week. Among the victims were both Hindus and Muslims. Amid incidents of stabbing, arson, and looting, as police and curfews failed to curb the violence, the Army took control of Old City and other areas for several days. Leaders of both BJP and AIMIM were among those arrested, including MIM MLAs at the time Amanullah Khan, Syed Sajad, Ibrahim Bin Abdullah Muskati, and BJP MLAs Ravindernath Reddy and Baddam Bal Reddy..By December 15, Chenna Reddy stepped down as CM, and the violence let up. He was replaced by Nedurumalli Janardhana Reddy, who blamed the VHP’s kar seva programme for the violence.Two years later, when the Babri Masjid was demolished on December 6, 1992, the Telugu states witnessed violence again. At least 10 people were killed in police firing or stabbings the very next day. Like the rest of India, there was tension in Hyderabad, Adilabad, Nellore, Mahabubnagar, Guntur, Kadapa, Hindupur, and other regions of Andhra Pradesh but this time, the state was able to contain the violence to a large extent, under CM Kotla Vijaya Bhaskara Reddy. Around 20 people were killed in the violence that followed the Babri Masjid demolition in Andhra Pradesh in 1992. But the violence of December 1990 remains the worst episode of communal violence in Hyderabad’s recent history..Asghar Ali Engineer writes that although the early incidents of the 1990 violence were triggered by non-religious disputes such as land-grabbing, the Babri Masjid controversy added fuel to existing political factors such as the rivalry between BJP and AIMIM in Hyderabad’s Old City, and attempts from within Congress to overthrow CM Chenna Reddy, ultimately killing nearly 300 people and reigniting religious conflicts.Read: The Sangh in Kerala stayed on the sidelines of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement

How the Telugu states’ most popular sweet shop financed the Ram Janmabhoomi movement

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