A couple of years ago,with their financial and political clout growing,the Reddy brothers of Bellary one of them now arrested for alleged illegal mining had a plan to make their close friend B Sreeramulu the chief minister of Karnataka. It was a dream they were said to often discuss in private after financing the victory of 23 BJP candidates in the May 2008 Assembly elections. The Reddy brothers,who have no mass base,saw an opportunity to tap into Sreeramulus scheduled tribe affiliations and STs sizable spread across the state. The grand plan was to use their wealth to create a pan-Karnataka footprint for themselves,by expanding Sreeramulus political base beyond their ore-rich home district. The plan ended up in tatters this July when the Lokayukta indicted almost everybody in the Reddy brothers group,including Sreeramulu,of involvement in illegal mining. The indictment meant that Sreeramulu was not made even a minister this year despite his claims of being a mass leader. An angry Sreeramulu quit as a BJP MLA on September 4 and is now contesting as an Independent in a bypoll on November 30. The bypoll,Sreeramulu hopes,will be his redemption for the indictment. For a man who aspires to be a chief minister,the now 40-year-old Sreeramulu is quite an enigma. A great fan of the movies,especially the masala Telugu kind,Ramulu,as he is often referred to,is said to have modelled his public appearance and style on that of the famous Telugu stars. A dapper dresser,he often gives out the impression that he is living in a film world. In November 2009,as floods ravaged the northern districts,Sreeramulu was accused of ducking into a theatre in Gadag district,of which he was then in charge,to catch the Hollywood disaster film 2012 instead of visiting the flood affected. One of eight children of a railway employee from Bellary,Sreeramulu charted a rise in politics that came on the back of a life in crime. Police records in Bellary district reveal that his younger days were spent as a street goon,often as a hired hand for political leaders. Once associated with the Congress,Sreeramulu was a councillor in the Bellary city by the time he was 24. A fallout with his then political mentor,Congress leader M Diwakar Babu,saw Ramulu move away from the party. Sreeramulus close association with Janardhan Reddy began around 1998 when Reddy floated a financial services company in Bellary that later ran aground. The two became the BJPs foot soldiers when Sushma Swaraj arrived in Bellary to fight Sonia Gandhi in the 1999 parliamentary polls. Both Sushma Swaraj and Sreeramulu,who contested the Assembly polls,lost that year but they set the ground for the BJPs subsequent storming of what was until then a Congress citadel. Sreeramulu has now been a minister in two governments featuring the BJP in Karnataka first for Tourism and Textiles in the JDS-BJP coalition,then for Health in the B S Yeddyurappa-led BJP government. Though his tenures have often been marked by a certain disinterestedness,Sreeramulu has managed to win some accolades as a district-in-charge minister in Gadag by endearing himself to people with his simple,street-wise approach to the resolution of day-to-day problems. Sreeramulu has also over the last three years managed to emerge the best recognised face of the Valmiki Nayak ST community in Karnataka. The recognition has translated into an electoral sway over voters in four to five districts around Bellary where ST communities form a significant proportion of the population. It is this emergence as a key ST leader that has now given him the wherewithal to take on the BJP and the Congress in an election in Bellary for the first time. The road ahead is however not a smooth one. The elections represent only one of his problems. A CBI investigation into illegal mining holds the portents of reaching Ramulu too. There is already evidence that one of his nephews,T H Suresh Babu,received some of the spoils of the illegal business run by the Reddy brothers,say CBI sources. There is evidence to show that some of the loot money from illegal mining was being shared with a nephew of Sreeramulu. If any money link emerges with Sreeramulu then he will have to answer for it, said a CBI official.
