A day after Telangana chief minister A. Revanth Reddy launched a scathing attack on actor Allu Arjun for the December 4 stampede at the premiere of his Telugu film, Pushpa: The Rule Part 2, at Sandhya cinema in Hyderabad, the city police alleged on December 22 that the actor insisted on sitting through the show in spite of being told that a woman had died in the stampede outside. The chaos at the cinema left 39-year-old Revathi dead and her minor son severely injured.
Arrested and granted bail the same day, Allu Arjun claimed at a press conference on December 21 that no cop had asked him to leave the cinema. He described it as “character assassination by spreading misinformation”.
ACP L. Ramesh Kumar said that it was only after the DCP stormed inside the cinema and gave the actor a deadline of 15 minutes to clear out that he budged. The Hyderabad police chief, C.V. Anand, released a six-and-a-half minute video to chronicle the events that unfolded on the fateful day, showing the actor being escorted out of the cinema by cops.
While politicians belonging to Congress criticised Allu Arjun for “giving more importance to his film’s promotion than to people’s lives”, the BJP blamed the government for the catastrophe. Junior Union home minister Bandi Sanjay told the Assembly that the Congress government had collaborated with AIMIM to target Tollywood as part of a “calculated conspiracy”.