Hyderabad, April 15 -- On a piece of CCTV footage from Banswada, a police officer watched a boy hand a stone to a man and coax him to throw it. When the officer later called the teenager in, the boy said nothing. That image, the Kamareddy Superintendent of Police (SP) says, is what the first quarter of 2026 looked like in Telangana. Twenty-seven hate crimes across the state, most of them not spontaneous but assembled, driven by fake narratives, WhatsApp forwards and crowds that travelled from outside town to participate.

The incidents were rarely isolated. Behind most of them lay a familiar mix of mob mentality, misinformation and administrative failure. The targets shifted, from Muslims, Dalits, and Hindu temples, but the architecture h...