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Journalism of Courage
Even though the Congress’s Karnataka president D K Shivakumar and former Chief Minister Siddaramaiah are known to be frontrunners for the top post in the event the party wins the May 10 Assembly elections — and several others are close behind — the party is unlikely to project a CM candidate before the elections.
The Congress’s strategy of building a rainbow coalition of various caste groups does not allow it to project any leader as the frontrunner for fear of losing support of communities that support it.
When the party won the Assembly polls in 2013, the decision to make Siddaramaiah the CM was taken afterward by the elected MLAs, with perceived backing of the party’s high command. In 2018, the projection of a second term for Siddaramaiah was seen as one of the reasons for Congress’s defeat, with his rivals in the party joining hands with other parties to defeat the Congress in many seats and leaving it 33 seats short of majority mark.
In the run-up to the elections, supporters of Siddaramaiah, who is a member of OBC (Other Backward Classes) Kuruba community, have raised slogans to suggest that he will be the CM again. This kind of sloganeering has been defused in the past few weeks, especially after former state unit chief Mallikarjun Kharge took charge as the Congress president.
Shivakumar who comes from the Vokkaliga community has not hidden his ambition of becoming the first Congress CM from the community since S M Krishna in 1999. At several rallies in Vokkaliga-dominated southern Karnataka over the last few weeks, Shivakumar has urged voters to back the party to facilitate his ascent to the top job.
Voters from the community, who have traditionally supported JD(S), are seen as veering towards the Congress if Shivakumar is seen to have a decent shot at the top post. Shivakumar is credited with taking effective control of the party since assuming charge and keeping dissent down to a minimum. The negatives against him are corruption and money laundering cases being pursued by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Enforcement Directorate (ED) from the Congress leader’s tenure as a minister in the Siddaramaiah government between 2013 and 2018.
Besides these two leaders, other Congress leaders who have expressed desire to be CM in the last few months are M B Patil (from Lingayat community), Satish Jarkiholi (from Scheduled Tribes community), G Parameshwara (from Dalit community), and Zameer Ahmed Khan.
On Wednesday, after the Election Commission (EC) announced the election date, Kharge said the choice of CM would be decided “after the polls”. He said, “After the polls, opinions of MLAs who are elected will be taken and the high command will decide on the basis of political strategies on who should become (CM). The choice of CM is never decided before the elections because it leads to infighting.”
The other main Opposition party in Karnataka, the Janata Dal (Secular), is projecting former CM H D Kumaraswamy, the son of party chief H D Deve Gowda, as its CM candidate.
Kumaraswamy — who was the CM between 2006 and 2007, and from 2018 to 2019 — has been working alone to galvanise the party across the state over the last five months and has come up with promises to improve health, education, and the lives of common people in the state
