Spotlight
Twenty-four years ago, Palvai Harish Babu, then 18, was studying medicine in Osmania Medical College, Hyderabad. He remembers September 15, 1999 clearly: he had just got up to start his day when the phone rang — at the time a landline. The family of four lived in the modest Sirsilk Mills Officers quarters in the industrial town of Kagaznagar, in Kumaram Bheem Asifabad district (then Adilabad), about 280 km from Hyderabad.
The caller broke the news that his father, Palvai Purshotham Rao, a three-time MLA, had been shot by People’s War Group, Naxalites. Harish Babu ran out of the house even as his wailing mother, Palvai Rajyalaxmi, tried to find out what was happening. When he reached Dr. Madhu’s Hospital on the Railway Station Road in Kagaznagar, he saw his father’s bullet-riddled body. Three of this father’s bodyguards also lost their lives.
