Veteran Kapu leader Mudragada Padmanabham passes away at 73
Veteran Kapu leader Mudragada Padmanabham passed away following a prolonged illness, at a private hospital in Hyderabad on Tuesday (July 14, 2026). He was 73
Veteran Kapu leader Mudragada Padmanabham passed away following a prolonged illness, at a private hospital in Hyderabad on Tuesday (July 14, 2026). He was 73 and is survived by two sons and a daughter. An astute politician, Mudragada Padmanabham had led Andhra Pradesh’s longest social movement against the successive governments to restore the Backward Class status for Kapus. Born to a Munciff family (Revenue officer) in Kirlampudi village in the undivided East Godavari district in 1953, Padmanabham’s entry into politics was an accident as he stepped into the shoes of his father and two-time MLA, Veera Raghava Rao, upon the latter’s demise. He had quit Janata Party when actor-turned-politician N.T. Rama Rao floated the Telugu Desam Party and served as Prathipadu MLA in 1983, 1985 and 1989.
He served as a Cabinet minister in NTR’s regime. Between 1995 and 1999, he was with the BJP. Later, he returned to TDP in 1999 and was elected as Kakinada Member of Parliament, before he joined the Congress. Later, he started the movement for the Backward Class status for Kapus. On January 31, 2016, Padmanabham led the Kapu Garjana, a movement waged against N. Chandrababu-led government for ‘betraying’ the 2014 election promise of granting the BC status to Kapus. The protesters set fire to Ratnachal Express near Tuni railway station after blocking Highway-16. The case registered against Padmanabham by the Indian Railways is still in the trial stage. At a time when the Kapu reservation movement was at its peak, YSR Congress party founder Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy announced in Kirlampudi that reservation for Kapus could not be guaranteed if he were voted to power in 2019.
Calling it a day for the Kapu movement, Padmanabham wrote an open letter to Kapu community on July 13, 2020. “An attack on my course of action to achieve the BC status for Kapus both on social media and TV channels by fellow Kapu people left me in shock, forcing me to quit the movement,” he said. “I joined the movement after Chandrababu Naidu betrayed the Kapus without granting BC Status. During the movement, I lost everything on both health and financial fronts. I also lost my political career but never bothered about such losses for the sake of the movement,” Padmanabham stated in his letter. In March 2024, Padmanabham joined YSRCP. Ahead of 2024 elections, he challenged that he would add ‘Reddy’ to his name if Jana Sena Party president K.
The BriefWire