Newsmaker | Mass leader, votary of social justice, fiercely secular: Siddaramaiah ticks many boxes for Cong

A reluctant Siddaramaiah broached the topic during a meeting with Rahul, and is said to have received an indication that he would be the frontrunner to be CM if the Congress won the 2023 polls.

During the election campaign, and after the May 13 verdict, bringing the Congress to power with a massive 135 seats, Siddaramaiah’s supporters kept talking of this. “The birthday celebrations, which took place on August 3, 2022, in Davangere, with Rahul Gandhi in attendance, despite some resistance from sections of the Congress, was an indication that Siddaramaiah would be a CM candidate for the 2023 polls,” they said.

A backward class leader with over five decades of political experience, Siddaramaiah, 75, is considered one of the three remaining mass leaders of Karnataka – alongside former prime minister H D Deve Gowda, 91, of the JD(S) and ex-CM B S Yediyurappa, 80, of the BJP.

Siddaramaiah draws his support from the Kurubas – the shepherd community to which he belongs – in addition to Muslims, being one of the most vocally secular leaders in Karnataka. This makes him influential in almost 70% of the total 224 constituencies in the state, including Lingayat- and Vokkaliga-dominated seats. In comparison, while Yediyurappa is largely a Lingayat leader, Deve Gowda draws his strength mostly from Vokkaligas.

This pan-Karnataka base of Siddaramaiah is one of the reasons the former CM is believed to enjoy the support of over 70% of the Congress’s 135 newly elected MLAs.

With his rivalry with Shivakumar an open secret, there was a stir during the campaign when Siddaramiah was quoted in a TV channel as saying that the Congress high command would not go over his head and appoint Shivakumar as the CM. Siddaramaiah later denied making the statement, adding that he had only said that the decision would ultimately be taken by the party high command after consultation with elected MLAs.

On Monday, putting forward his case to be CM, Siddaramaiah’s main rival D K Shivakumar argued: “I will not talk about the numbers on my side. I am not here for the worship of individuals, but of the party. I have 135 MLAs of the party with me. I am the party president and national party president Sonia Gandhi made me the state president. The number we have today is 135.”

Sources close to Siddaramaiah said he is equally ready for the fight, having left nothing to chance since the results despite his overwhelming influence among the Congress MLAs.

“On the evening after the victory, Siddaramaiah himself called up all the newly elected Congress MLAs and spoke to them. He also spoke to Independent MLAs like Latha Mallikarjun to seek their support,” a source said.

Another reason for Siddaramaiah’s popularity and acceptance is his politics, which goes back to his Janata Dal days and is rooted in the philosophy of social and economic justice. With the Congress and other anti-BJP parties identifying social justice as a means to beat back the BJP’s Hindutva, Siddaramaiah is a good man to front the job.

As CM holding the Finance portfolio during his 2013-18 tenure, Siddaramaiah had implemented measures such as providing 7 kg of rice to members of BPL homes, setting up canteens selling food at low costs, allotment of substantial funds for free food grains and milk to the poor, and for schemes meant for backward classes, Dalits and minorities. Nearly 24% of the state budget was set aside annually for SC/ST communities.

This is seen as also making him ideal to oversee implementation of the Congress’s “five guarantees” – which are seen to have played a major factor in its win – such as allowance of Rs 2,000 per month for women heads of households and Rs 3,000 for unemployed graduates in the state.

“The Congress needs to roll out its guarantees within the next six to eight months if it wants to do well in the state in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls,” a senior bureaucrat points out.

Siddaramaiah has consciously projected an image of a rustic, down-to-earth politician who identifies with the problems of the downtrodden, including the Dalits. “As finance minister and chief minister, when I sit down to prepare the Budget, the thing that comes to my mind is the vision of a poor man in my village who stood at the doorstep of a rich farmer begging for a bowl of rice for his ailing daughter,” he once said during his last tenure.

The high command had expressed appreciation for Siddaramaiah’s policies at the time. “If we run a state, it must be the Congress way. I am proud to say that Siddaramaiah, with his focus on the poor, with his ability to listen to people, is running a Congress government,” Rahul had said at a party event.

The BJP, which realises Siddaramaiah’s popularity, often refers to him as “Siddaramullah Khan”, to suggest that he is pro-Muslim. These attacks sharpened following the Siddaramaiah government’s decision to celebrate the birth anniversary of Mysore ruler Tipu Sultan, whom the BJP projects as an anti-Hindu king responsible for atrocities against the community.

During the Siddaramaiah government, the BJP also accused it of being biased against the dominant state communities such as the Vokkaligas, Lingayats and Brahmins.

These claims are widely believed to have fed into the anti-incumbency against the Siddaramaiah government, and ultimately the defeat of the Congress in the 2018 polls.

Siddaramaiah has always shaken off such name-calling, saying it is only a testament to his secular value system. “Today, we are told that being a good Indian means we have to ignore inequality and exploitation in our midst, that we need to adhere to rigid norms regarding food, clothing, language and free speech, that we have to privilege the majoritarian view of India. I reject that view as totally opposed to the letter and spirit of our Constitution,” he had said once at a conference on B R Ambedkar when he was CM.

Siddaramaiah’s background couldn’t be more different compared to Shivakumar, and his declared wealth of Rs 1,214 crore in the affidavit for the recent polls. The 75-year-old, who declared assets of Rs 19.01 crore in his affidavit, ventured into public life under the late farmers’ rights leader and Lohiaite, Prof M D Nanjundaswamy, in the 1970s. During the Emergency, Siddaramaiah, a lawyer by profession, found himself in the company of vociferously anti-government Kannada writers such as Dalit author Devanuru Mahadeva.

Siddaramaiah retains those close links with Kannada intelligentsia and often battles right-wing agenda and thinking through intellectual forums in Karnataka.

Under the Janata Party and Chief Minister Ramakrishna Hegde, Siddaramaiah was appointed to his first government position in 1983. He became chairman of the erstwhile Kannada Watchdog Committee, to guard the interests of the Kannada language — a task he still considers close to his heart.

In 1996, Siddaramaiah became deputy CM under J H Patel, a post he held again in 2004 in a JD(S)-Congress coalition government. In 2006, however, Deve Gowda sacked him for floating a collective of backward castes, Dalits and minorities in the state called AHINDA, which was viewed as an anti-party activity.

Soon after, Siddaramaiah joined the Congress. In 2006, he won a bypoll from Chamundeshwari seat in his home district of Mysore by a narrow margin of 257 votes, against the combined might of the ruling JD(S)-BJP coalition.

As CM, Siddaramaiah was attacked by the BJP over disarming of the Karnataka Lokayukta police powers to independently probe corruption in the government, and vesting of these with a state-controlled anti corruption bureau. Recently, the courts overturned this.

However, Siddaramaiah himself has remained above reproach. A case against him during his tenure as CM – including a diary with alleged jottings on payments to the high command which was seized by the IT department – and allegations of undoing notifications for government land acquisition ahead of the 2018 polls, have not stuck.