In Telangana, the Congress has spoken the language of minority inclusion with great fluency; the 2023 campaign was saturated with that promise. But when the speeches are set against the ledgers, notifications, cabinet lists, and ground reports, a harsher truth appears. Symbolic gestures abound, but substantive delivery is scarce. If we ask minorities for their ballots, do we also give them budgets that reach, institutions that function, and a voice in decision-making? Or, are we witnessing a new grammar of governance — optics over outcomes?
Start with money, the hardest truth in public policy. For FY 2025–26, the state earmarked Rs 3,591 crore for the Minorities Welfare Department and even issued budget release orders of roughly Rs 2,496 crore. Yet the outflow to beneficiaries remains a trickle. This pattern —announce big, release some, spend little — turns welfare into waiting. Allocations that harp on and signal inclusion but fail to translate into any form of lived benefits, at best appear as “papered welfare”, the effect of which is not fiscal neutrality but rather a reproduction of inequalities. Where, precisely, is the bottleneck and who is accountable for this gap? Whether delays stem from fiscal federalism, bureaucracy, or political will, the deeper issue is an opaque accountability chain.
Surprisingly, education support has taken the sharpest hit. Post-Matric scholarships (MTF) and tuition fee reimbursement (RTF) once covered students on a near-saturation basis. Today, “sanctions under progress” has become a euphemism for money that doesn’t arrive. This receding allocations to scholarships is an illustration of how fiscal retrenchment can and has disproportionately harmed the expansion of capabilities. For the first generation of learners, these aberrations do not only delay their progress, but cause irreparable damage by truncating intergenerational mobility itself. Scholarships have collapsed: Once near-saturation, they now reach only a fraction of students. Delays not only block degrees but truncate intergenerational mobility.
Consider Telangana Minorities Residential Educational Institutions Society (TMREIS), with its network of residential schools and upgraded junior colleges, that became a national reference. Once a flagbearer, it has been destabilised by the cash-flow uncertainty and reliance on rented premises — fragility that only a time-bound capital plan can resolve. This tension between programmatic ambition and infrastructural fragility amplifies the debates on welfare state consolidation, reminding us that even the most promising of schemes, celebrated as symbols of inclusion, become precarious unless backed by sustained capital investment. Today, even as sizeable sums are nominally allocated and partially released, spending lags.
The anaemia extends to centrally supported assets. Under the Pradhan Mantri Jan Vikas Karyakram (PMJVK), Telangana has struggled even to pass on Union funds already received, let alone put up the state’s matching share. On the ground, sanctioned school and community buildings show a slow pipeline; many are stuck at agreement, plinth, or finishing stages. When a state holds funds but does not transmit them, is the problem scarcity, or state capacity and prioritisation? Such gaps are symptomatic of the chronic tension that fiscal federalism in India grapples with, leaving schools and community centres half-built, undermining the community’s trust in the state. Even high-visibility services like Haj embarkation and imam honoraria now face delays, deepening perceptions of neglect. If the most visible windows of minority welfare are obstructed, what does that say about the less visible corridors?
Representation is where the story becomes unmistakable. In 2023, Congress gave only six tickets to Muslim candidates and ended with zero Muslim MLAs. Descriptive representation can rarely be cosmetic, it fosters political trust and indicates openness in the polity. The Congress government has yet to appoint a Muslim minister — a democratic deficit compounded by welfare under-reach. The turbulence around waqf governance deepens the unease. The Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025, still under judicial review, has paralysed the board, multiplying litigation and stalling asset recovery. This dilemma personifies “procedural entrapment”, where the uncertainty in law multiplies litigation and undermines the effectiveness of institutions. Why push selective implementation of a sub judice law instead of ring-fencing essential functions, setting up a litigation-and-recovery cell, and focusing first on high-value encroachments?
None of this absolves the previous regime. BRS left unfinished tasks — TMREIS buildings needed sustained capital; debates on reservations remained unresolved. But the comparison still matters considering that it is less about nostalgia for BRS and more about establishing a normative benchmark: In democratic accountability, regime change should imply progression, not regression. Obliterating this could carry the risk of reducing elections to mere cycles of symbolic turnover without any measure of substantive advancements. The BRS period combined higher and steadier expenditure with cabinet-level minority presence and the maturation of large-scale systems like TMREIS. Under Congress, the picture so far looks like release-without-reach and representation-without-voice — votes sought, dignity deferred. Why should citizens accept a lower bar after a transition that promised better?
If the government is serious about moving from symbolism to substance, five immediate actions are warranted. First, publish a strict calendar to clear all MTF/RTF arrears within the current semester, and put out a weekly, schematic dashboard. Second, release the state’s PMJVK matching share to trigger Union tranches and finish the long-pending projects — especially schools and skill centres. Third, set quarterly targets to reduce the number of TMREIS schools in rented premises and pair this with a multi-year capital plan, including PMJVK convergence and state capex. Fourth, while the Waqf law is pending before the Supreme Court, avoid selective roll-outs of contested provisions; instead, create a dedicated litigation and recovery cell to cut the docket and prioritise high-value encroachment cases. Fifth, commit to a clear timeline for cabinet inclusion from the minority community and adopt transparent criteria for candidate selection.
Above all, we need a culture shift, from announcements to accountability, from festival optics to structural outcomes, from seeking votes to sharing voice. Budgets must become benefits; releases must become receipts; dashboards must become discipline. The questions are simple, the answers measurable, and the stakes generational. The case of Telangana is an illumination of the wider question: Can state-level regimes move from optics to outcomes in minority inclusion?
Alam is professor and head, Department of Political Science, Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad and Srivastava is Policy and Governance Fellow, Billion Connect
