In The Service of Public
After completing the barrister course with a certificate of honour in London, Prakasam relocated to Madras high court. He was one of the prominent Telugu barrister to be successful; until then, most of the successful lawyers were either Europeans or Tamilians. He dealt with both civil and criminal cases. Of the latter, one of the important cases was the Ash murder case. Ash was the Collector of Tirunelveli and was shot dead in 1907. This was at a time when Bipin Chandra Pal, the nationalist leader from Bengal was touring the region, making fiery speeches on nationalism. Prakasam defended one of the accused and ensured that he got away with a light sentence. Prakasam also edited Law times, a legal magazine. The same year he presided over Bipin Chandra Pal’s lecture at Madras when others were afraid to come forward, given that the government of the day considered Pal’s speeches to border on sedition. He started attending the Congress Party sessions regularly after the Lucknow pact and signed the Satyagraha pledge in October 1921. He gave up his lucrative law practice. He also started and was the working editor of a newspaper Swarajya (literally self-rule). Swarajya was published simultaneously in English, Telugu and Tamil.
He also ran a national school and a Khadi production centre. He was elected the general secretary of the Congress Party in December 1921 at the Ahmedabad session. Whenever there was unrest or strife such as a riot, he tried to be there so as to comfort people. He visited Punjab during Akali Satyagraha and the Hindu-Muslim riots in Multan. He toured Kerala during the Moplah rebellion despite a ban on visitors from outside the area and had his property at Ooty attached by the government as a consequence. In 1922, during the Non-cooperation Movement, he organised a demonstration by 30,000 Congress volunteers at Guntur. In 1926, he was elected to the Central Legislative Assembly on a Congress Party ticket.
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