Congress party leaders drew criticism in Hyderabad on Wednesday after they used caged birds during a public event held on the occasion of Dasara festivities in the city.
Controversy erupted around the programme once material from the gathering began circulating online. A social media post shows Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee chief B. Mahesh Kumar Goud with a palapitta, the Indian Roller bird that local speakers know by that name.
In the post, Goud could be seen holding the bird after it was brought to him in a cage. He showed it to the audience at the venue and then released it while people watched the sequence unfold.
Loudspeaker announcements at the site blared that the palapitta had arrived, overlapping with the moment the state unit chief displayed the bird and let it go.
The event was a Congress leadership public gathering tied to Dasara, not a private meeting. Party figures at the front of the programme, including the TPCC head, were visible in the footage users shared from Hyderabad on Wednesday.
The clip that fuelled the dispute was posted on social media rather than issued through an official party channel. Shares of the post put the cage and the staged release at the centre of objections to the festive event.
Criticism focused on bringing a confined bird to a public Dasara programme and presenting it to the crowd before the release. The bird had been carried in a cage up to the point Goud held it for the audience.
Hyderabad hosted the Wednesday occasion as Dasara festivities were under way. Nothing in the account available by Wednesday evening described a forest department complaint, a police case, or a formal reply from Congress headquarters about the palapitta or how it was obtained.
The post captures the full sequence from the cage being brought to Goud through the display and release, all during the Dasara-linked public programme in Hyderabad. Users who shared the material online drew attention to Congress leaders’ use of a caged bird at a festive rally on Wednesday.
