D K Shivakumar has finally reached where he had aspired to. He has become the chief minister of Karnataka with little or no ideological baggage, but with loads of loyalty points. He has also had the unique privilege to define, in the last quarter century since S M Krishna became chief minister of the state in 1999, what his “loyalty” meant to the Congress system.
It is important to remember that DK grew within the Congress system when the party had accepted the diminishing of its dominance in Indian politics. It is possible to argue that his career was made between two AICC sessions, one in Pachmarhi in 1998, where the party was still speaking of “revival and renewal” as a singular force, and the 2003 Shimla session, where there was a larger embrace of coalition politics, which foresaw troubles and necessitated troubleshooters.
In 1999, the Congress had seen big exits on Sonia Gandhi’s foreign-origin issue, and the party had slipped into a palpable crisis. Around that time, a resource-rich state like Karnataka, under S M Krishna, became extremely useful for the party to keep its confidence till the 2004 moment arrived. DK, as Krishna’s daring and dashing points man, became something of a link between the Krishna government and the Congress high command. It is then that he assiduously built his network, sustained it over the years, and also made hyperbolic claims about his capacity and capital. This, till he learnt to play the power game with a combination of nimbleness and knavishness in more recent years.
DK’s brand of politics constantly created an image problem for him in a landscape where progressive labels, like the one his immediate predecessor, Siddaramaiah, wore with disingenuous aplomb, have long been the political fashion. DK is the first chief minister who does not fit into any of the ideological, demographic, or identity labels easily. He neither represents big ideas like Devaraj Urs, Ramakrishna Hegde, and H D Deve Gowda, nor a technocratic vision like his mentor Krishna. He is a Vokkaliga, but he is not the community’s supreme representative. He is challenged by the patriarchy of Gowda and his family.
In this sense, DK is in his own mold, without exactly a precedent in Karnataka. He is largely perceived as a combination of mammon and muscle. To his credit, he has never been pretentious. He has not been groomed in the subtle art of wearing masks. This is what made his inauguration ceremony on June 3 very interesting. Bengaluru and all highways leading to the city were flooded with flex banners, flags, and hoardings celebrating his rise. There was even a 100-foot cut-out of DK with garlands, something once reserved for film stars outside single-screen movie theatres. It was not the new age way of announcing or celebrating a climb. It was the old Congress way, reminiscent of its style between the mid-1970s and early 1990s, when DK was grooming himself in a nondescript corner of rural Bengaluru, and was still fascinated by the power of underworld gangs that ran the city. There was something about an old school-boy nostalgia to the June 3 flamboyance.
Importantly, there is an unmissable dichotomy to DK’s rise in Rahul Gandhi’s Congress today. DK does not represent, in a big or small way, all that Rahul Gandhi has recently advocated. He has been dutiful and loyal, but that does not exactly make him an ambassador of his party’s new game.
First of all, DK does not blend into the anti-establishment image that Gandhi is trying to fit himself into. He does not seem averse to a centralising impulse that jettisons federal arrangement. He is not an excited proponent of either OBC politics or the caste census. He was trying to be “neutral” and claimed the methodology as “unscientific” when caste census numbers did not exactly favour his Vokkaliga community in Karnataka. DK has not reveled in identity politics. He has been comfortable with big capital and corporates when Gandhi has made noise about “crony capitalism”. Interestingly, DK was perhaps the only prominent Congressman who attended the Ambani family wedding in July 2024. Not surprisingly, DK is the richest CM in India. It is perhaps indicative of his pragmatism rather than his idealism or ideological hangovers.
Further, while Rahul Gandhi has made an attempt to highlight problems of India’s rural and migratory poor, DK, like Krishna, has not taken his eyes off the revenue-spinning city of Bengaluru. He has reworked its boundaries, championed big infrastructure, lucrative contracts, real estate projects like the Bidadi township, a Skydeck, and a tunnel road running miles, among other things.
Again, DK, unlike Gandhi, is excessively ritualistic, and that was on display on June 3, and in the temple runs before it. He, after all, took the oath in the name of his revered pontiff, while offering a small consolation to his boss by prominently holding the red pocket edition of the Constitution with the oath papers. Neither emotion nor reason binds DK. There is a unique fluidity that defines his political persona.
DK is also painted as “anti-intellectual”. His relationship with Kannada writers and intellectuals has been uncomfortable. He sees them as patronage-seeking, co-opted members of the party. That may be true, but the other chief ministers smartly put them in an “autonomous” silo. DK perhaps worries about his image, but thinks a big marketing spend can fix it.
Going ahead, the least of the problems that DK may have is to surmount the legacy of Siddaramaiah, which is yet to be fact-checked by history, especially because the former chief minister’s social justice branding did not majorly contribute to the vote share of Congress during the two decades he has been in the party. In fact, the BJP, despite its local leadership problems, has stabilised its vote share. Also, the alleged scams during Siddaramaiah’s term have not fully dissolved. There is also a fiscal distress caused by the guarantee schemes. Ironically, DK cannot fully escape the anti-incumbency built up under Siddaramaiah because he was number two in the previous government, and also the Karnataka Congress president.
The writer is a senior journalist and author of The Conscious Network: A Chronicle of Resistance to a Dictatorship
DK does not blend into the anti-establishment image that Gandhi is trying to fit himself into. He does not seem averse to a centralising impulse that jettisons federal arrangement 
Share
