The Telangana movement centred on a cultural identity may indeed succeed in winning statehood. Yet, identifying and redressing the grievances of Telangana is a twofold challenge: countering crisis-ridden state cultures of neoliberal populism and harnessing the global city region of Hyderabad towards more equitable development. Historicist narratives of grievance and injury obscure the more recent roots of the Telangana movement, to be found in the anger against the dystopia of competitive populist politics in post-reform Andhra Pradesh, which has also produced new geographies of accumulation, injustice and exclusion in the last 20 years. This remains to be acknowledged.