Vikarabad district doesn’t feel like the rest of Telangana. Its highways are rubble, bridges crumbling and its parched fields miss the state-funded elixir of drip irrigation.

On Wednesday, district superintendent of police T. Annapurna was transferred by the Election Commission for ordering the arrest of sitting MLA and Congress candidate A. Revanth Reddy the day before.

Reddy, the firebrand campaigner for the Congress-led Prajakutami alliance and a working president of the party, was taken into preventive custody in a pre-dawn raid ahead of chief minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao’s rally in the constituency.

The detention was found “unwarranted” and the Election Commission ordered the immediate transfer of Annapurna and said her services should not be used for the polls. The state will vote on December 7.

Other than undivided Nalgonda district, the Congress’s best performance in the 2014 Assembly elections in undivided Andhra Pradesh was in this region — then part of Mahbubnagar district — known for its Banjara nomad hamlets, limestone quarries and cement plants. A major grouse of locals is that jobs in these plants have gone to Bihari migrant labourers.

On Wednesday, the last day for campaigning, boisterous bikers with Congress flags swarmed Kodangal while TRS focussed on door-to-door campaigns, cautious after Revanth's men ripped down all their publicity material to protest his detention. A two-time MLA, he was earlier with the Telugu Desam Party that is contesting these polls in alliance with the Congress.

Siddhilingam Babu, a retired bureaucrat who watched the Congress workers dancing and sloganeering outside his friend Prabhakar Rao’s pharmacy on Wednesday, said he believed the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi’s investment in water supply and roads will help the party. If not that, then the doles.

“The detention was unnecessary but there is no sympathy for him as he has made the place tense,” he said. But his friend Rao, like many others in Kodangal, put the Congress and the TRS on an equal footing here.

In villages, the debate is heated. Senior citizen Hanumanthappa almost came to blows with Anjeya Naidu, a young farmer, in Parsapur village. “My only demand is, ‘don’t discriminate’. Some get pension, some don’t. The village tank is dry and there is no fishing, which was a source of income during drought years like this. All these graduates are idling in the village with no work,” said Hanumanthappa. “At least KCR is trying to get water here, and has given you a pension and sponsors marriages. What did others do?” Naidu shot back.

But in the tribal villages, the balance tilts towards the Congress. Bappaly Tanda’s Hanuman Chavan is on leave from his job as a mason in Mumbai to vote in Kodangal. The fields behind him are dry, the government’s free drip irrigation lines for tribals and Dalits — ubiquitous in the TRS boroughs in the north — have not reached here. Even drinking water connections under the much-publicised Mission Bhagiratha are still to come.

“I left my land and went to Maharashtra, as I had to feed my parents, wife, and five daughters back here. I have saved up to marry off three of them. The pensions are good, but it makes sense to vote for Congress. That’s where the wind is blowing in the rest of the country.”