Nalgonda, April 20: Remnants of a bloody past are visible in this Lok Sabha constituency in the heart of the Telengana region that was once a communist bastion.

Communists called the shots here half a century ago, scripting a bloody uprising against the Nizam and his henchmen, the Razakars, between 1946 and 1949. The armed struggle died out by 1951. The might of the communists was such that the legendary Ravi Reddy Narayana, leader of the undivided Communist Party, won the Nalgonda parliamentary seat in 1952 polling more votes than Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

After Independence, the Nizam-ruled state was divided into three parts. Telengana, comprising Hyderabad, Nalgonda, Nizamabad, Karimnagar, Adilabad, Khammam, Miryalaguda and Mahboobnagar, remained with Andhra Pradesh, but the other districts went to Maharashtra and Karnataka.

The movement — regarded as the glorious chapter of communist history in India — would have given birth to a Telengana country, but the uprising was ruthlessly suppressed. The peasants did not want the kingdom to be part of India and wanted to snatch power from the Razakars; they raised a 10,000-strong army, but 3,000 volunteers were killed and the rebellion quashed.

Five decades later, the only reminder of the communist past is hundreds of roadside stupas — red tapering pillars covered with hammer and sickle — over a 200-km stretch in the area, erected in the martyrs’ memory.

Communist parties are contesting two Lok Sabha seats and two dozen Assembly seats in Andhra Pradesh this time and a Left resurgence appears likely in parts of the Telengana region.

CPI state secretary Suravaram Sudhakar Reddy is contesting the Nalgonda Lok Sabha seat while CPM’s Babu Rao is in the fray in the temple city of Bhadrachalam in Khammam district. Both are comfortably placed.

Reddy is so sure of his victory that he filed his nomination papers during the inauspicious rahu kaalam when no important work is taken up. The CPI leader, who won this seat in 1998, deliberately filed his papers at 12.45 pm, wanting to prove that he can win irrespective of the planetary positions and that communists are not superstitious. “By winning… I want to prove… rahu kaalam is good for us,” he said.

The CPI won Nalgonda in 1996 and 1998 but lost to the Desam a year later. But this time Reddy is relaxed. A combination of anti-incumbency against the Desam, which has been in power for nine years, the growing demand for a separate Telengana state, poverty, backwardness, a fourth successive drought and a Congress-Left-Telengana Rashtra Samiti alliance has put Reddy on a strong wicket compared to his BJP rival Indrasena Reddy.