Hyderabad: Telangana chief minister A. Revanth Reddy spent Diwali morning mocking BRS working president K.T. Rama Rao, and he did it with a beard.
"The way a fox cannot become a tiger by imitating its stripes, you cannot become a tiger by imitating one," Revanth Reddy said on Sunday morning. "Simply growing a beard does not make you Revanth Reddy. It took him 50 years to grow a beard. Who knows how many more years it will take him to gain some wisdom?"
He added: "Until the leader changes his mindset, the people of Telangana will never trust him."
The timing was deliberate. Festival mornings are not usually when chief ministers open a fresh front against the opposition, and the remark has restarted a running argument between the ruling Congress and the BRS in the state.
What the jibe targets is not really facial hair. It is the charge that KTR is imitating a style of leadership rather than building one, and the chief minister left no ambiguity about which of the two men he considers the original.
There has been no official response from KTR's side yet.
Rama Rao is the working president of the BRS and the party's most visible voice on the opposition benches in the assembly, which is where a reply is most likely to come.
Political circles in Hyderabad read the Sunday remark as the ruling party landing the first blow of the festive week. Telangana has no election announcement on the table right now, so for the moment this is a statement rather than a campaign line.
Revanth Reddy has questioned the opposition's record before. Sunday's comment moved the argument from policy to personality, and that is the part likely to be remembered.
For now the festival carries on across the state, with Lakshmi Puja in the evening. The political reply will wait until the lights go out.