Hyderabad, Dec. 3: Protesting Telengana activists today disrupted a meeting involving a British guest of the state government, Robert Charles Cotton, leaving the administration red-faced.

Cotton, a retired teacher, is the great-grandson of Sir Arthur Cotton, former British collector of Andhra Pradesh who is revered for revolutionising irrigation systems in the region in the 1850s.

The Telengana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) agitators barged into a five-star hotel where Cotton was chief guest at a photo exhibition on irrigation projects. They shouted slogans against the government for spending lavishly on its guest while the “boys of Telengana” were suffering.

The government has shut down colleges, hostels and canteens in the Telengana districts following a student agitation over the arrest of TRS leader K. Chandrasekhar Rao.

“How can you put up your guest in a five-star hotel when you are closing hostel canteens, denying food to our boys?” the protesters screamed before police arrested about a hundred of them.

Ministers at the programme quickly guided Cotton and his wife to the safety of their room in the hotel.

The erstwhile Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy government had gone to great lengths to locate Cotton at Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, and planned to bring him to Hyderabad to showcase him along with the then chief minister. YSR, who spent Rs 40,000 crore on irrigation projects in his first term, was to be projected as “Abhinava Cotton (Present-day Cotton)”.

YSR loyalists went on with the plan even after his death, much to the chagrin of chief minister K. Rosaiah.

For the past three-four days, Cotton has been taken around irrigation sites in the state and showcased at public meetings. He is to leave tomorrow.