Do we like them?Do we like Revanth Reddy?
Our score: 5 out of 10. An asterisk on harm and a mixed good-person result, with thin evidence on the good he has done, leaves him in the middle.
Revanth Reddy was born in 1969 into an agricultural family in Kondareddipally, in what was then undivided Andhra Pradesh. He cut his teeth in the ABVP student wing, then hopped from the TRS to the TDP, and in 2017 to Congress. He won a Lok Sabha seat in 2019, took over the state Congress in 2021, and led the party to 64 seats in 2023, becoming Telangana's first Congress chief minister.
The stain that follows him is the 2015 cash-for-votes case. The Anti-Corruption Bureau alleged he was caught on camera in a sting offering ₹50 lakh to a nominated MLA to back a TDP candidate. He spent about a month in jail before getting bail. In 2024 a plea to move the trial to Bhopal was heard, because the petitioners argued a sitting chief minister could sway witnesses. We found no public response from him in those reports, and no verdict.
On the harm test, we found no campaign of his own against LGBTQ+ people or women. Activists did write to him in April 2026 asking for an Assembly resolution against the Transgender Amendment Act, 2026, and the report carried no reply from him. We couldn't open the pages on his trans-inclusion schemes, so we've left them out of the score and the evidence is thinner than we'd like.
The Hindu-gods row is the contested one. At a Congress meeting in late 2025 he asked “How many gods are there for Hindus? Three crores?” while arguing that party consensus was hard to reach. The BJP called it an insult to Hindus and held protests. A fair reading is that he was making a point about party infighting. Another reading is that it was a careless joke at the expense of people's faith.
The planet is where he's most exposed. He defended auctioning the 400 acres at Kancha Gachibowli for IT firms, promising jobs, even after the Supreme Court's expert committee said the land had “all characteristics of a forest”. The Court criticised the deforestation and told the state to bring the greenery back. He called the setback temporary and said he would not stop.
The Musi riverfront project is the other big one. He pitched it as cleaning up a polluted river and fixing Hyderabad's traffic, but residents fear eviction and environmental groups want more transparency. After the backlash he set up a cabinet sub-committee in March 2026 to consult critics. He promised “no family would be displaced without support”, though in 2024 compensation for about 10,000 houses was still being negotiated.