Bengaluru: “Madam, there are comments on your Instagram page asking when you’ll get married,” a reporter asked, almost sounding shy himself.
“First search for a boy for me. A Gowda boy. You search. I am unable to see anyone,” replied Kannada actor and Congress star campaigner for Karnataka Divya Spandana, intermittently glancing at the blushing party leaders seated next to her.
Spandana, also known as Ramya, has hit the ground running as she campaigns for her party in the southern state, which goes to polls 10 May. This is almost three years since she quit as head of the Congress’s social media wing, and went incommunicado.
In her over 20-year-long acting career, none of Ramya’s achievements has been as stunning as her surprise Lok Sabha entry in 2013 after winning from Mandya, the Vokkaliga heartland. Despite her return as a Congress campaigner now, it is the actor’s personal life that continues to intrigue one and all.
But how did she end up contesting elections? Speaking to ThePrint in Bengaluru on 26 April, a day before she began canvassing, Ramya said, “I didn’t know anything about politics, my father was friends with (former CM) S.M. Krishna.”
She added, “Ambareesh (M.H. Amarnath, former Kannada actor and a former MP from Mandya) and S.M. Krishna couldn’t agree on a candidate from Mandya. Siddaramaiah was in a bit of a spot (because of that) so he reached out to my father and asked, ‘Why don’t we get Ramya to contest?’ That’s how my name came up. Because I belong to Mandya and the same community.”
The day she filed her nomination papers and made her electoral debut in Mandya in 2013, her father (R.T. Naryana) succumbed to a massive heart attack. His death left the actress distraught and shattered.
Despite her grief, Ramya plodded on, entering the Lok Sabha for a period of nine months before the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, making her one of the youngest Members of Parliament.
“I didn’t know (a thing about) the Vidhan Sabha, the Lok Sabha, constituency, the districts…and ten days later, I was in the Parliament,” she told ThePrint, recalling her whirlwind entry into electoral politics.
Ramya won the Mandya Parliament seat in August 2013 in a Lok Sabha bypoll defeating Janata Dal (S) candidate C.S. Puttaraju by a margin of 55,000 votes. However, in 2014 Lok Sabha elections, she lost to the same candidate by a margin of 5,000-odd votes. In 2017, she was elevated to the post of Congress social media cell head.
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‘Re-entry? Maybe!’
Though she had a short stint as the Congress social media wing chief, it was under Ramya that the party grew its appetite for aggression to take on the BJP’s online army.
Her Twitter post comparing Prime Minister Narendra Modi to ‘bird droppings’ in 2018 raked up a storm, earning her a life’s worth of dedicated trolling. Even Rahul Gandhi reportedly pulled her up for this while BJP MPs, MLAs, leaders and supporters attacked her online.
In March this year, firebrand BJP MP Pratap Simha posted a picture with Ramya, only to be trolled for being star-struck. “Politically, I still criticise her even today. But I really like her acting,” said Simha in response to one such post.
As for her re-entry into the political battlefield, Ramya said it was Congress general secretary (organisation) K.C. Venugopal who had reached out, asking if she would be their star campaigner.
“I took a break in 2019 for personal issues and then Covid happened. Now I have my own production house and am making a comeback with a film. We start shooting in July. In the meantime, the star campaigning gig came around,” she added.
In her new avatar, Ramya looks rejuvenated, and more sorted in her priorities. “You don’t have to follow the path of those ahead of you, you can change it. Today, the times have changed, the way people look at women in politics has changed, So I want to carve my own niche and set new standards,” she told ThePrint.
But her movie, she insisted, is not the gateway for her re-entry into the political fray as it will not be released before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
While non-committal on her preferred seat as “that is up to the party”, she finds an organisational role more appealing. Coaxed about her choice of a seat, or the possibility of a ticket for the 2024 contest, she said, “Maybe! Who knows!”
There are many politicians in Karnataka — some even from the same party — who do not see eye-to-eye in public, but Ramya may be an exception. “I did get asked (to contest) this election as well — not just by the Congress but by the BJP as well. But I don’t think I can take on that responsibility right now. But we’ll see,” she told ThePrint.
Did she consider the option of joining the BJP when the offer came? “No way. How could I, after Rahulji did so much for me when I was going through such a difficult period in life?” she was quick to reply.
Reel to real politics
Karnataka has a limited history of electing film personalities as political leaders compared to the neighbouring Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, where cinema personalities such as J. Jayalalithaa, M.G. Ramachandran (MGR) and N.T. Rama Rao enjoyed a ‘god-like’ status.
However, Kannada movie stars have been pressured to take up politics and parties do cash in on their popularity as crowd-pullers.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, when actress Sumalatha visited villages as part of her campaign as an independent from Mandya, the question she was most asked was if superstars D-Boss (Darshan Thoogudeepa) and Yash, who had campaigned for her, would come again to the district.
Sumalatha has scores of films in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada to her credit and her late husband, Ambareesh, was an iconic actor with a chequered political history.
“In Karnataka, not much political weightage is given to actors,” a Bengaluru-based political analyst told ThePrint, requesting anonymity.
The analyst recalled a particular incident when Kannada movie icon, Dr. Rajkumar, was at the peak of his career in the early 1970s. He went on to become the face of the Kannada agitation (for unification of the state) and was asked to contest the assembly elections. Rajkumar and his family were hesitant to enter politics though his elder son, Shivarajkumar, is married to the daughter of then chief minister, S. Bangarappa.
“It was said that Congress’s Devaraj Urs, also the state’s longest-serving CM, told Rajkumar to keep his distance from politics. A short while later, in 1974, Rajkumar released a movie called Sampathige Saval (Challenging wealth/authority). Though there is nothing to prove that the movie was a reaction to what Urs allegedly said to Rajkumar, the timing fuelled the speculation,” the analyst added.
There are several other actors — Ananth Nag, Umashree, B.C. Patil, Madhu Bangarappa, to name a few — who have had limited success as politicians.
Actor Kichcha Sudeep was roped in by Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai to campaign for the BJP for the coming assembly elections, opening the floodgates of online hate against the actor and his choice of association.
Rajkumar’s son Shivarajkumar and his wife, Geetha, are campaigning for the Congress.
(Edited by Smriti Sinha)
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