Bengaluru: Over 13 months after he ensured that his party somehow managed to form a government in Karnataka, Congress man Friday D.K. Shivakumar is once again trying to achieve what seems like the impossible — save the government.
After 13 Congress legislators resigned from the Karnataka legislative assembly last week, spelling doom for the party’s alliance government with JD(S), Shivakumar took charge and the results are now starting to show.
On Saturday, Shivakumar was seen at the residence of rebel MLA M.T.B. Nagaraj, a day after the H.D. Kumaraswamy-led coalition got temporary relief with the Supreme Court ordering the Karnataka speaker not to decide on the disqualification or resignations of the rebel MLAs.
Soon after, Nagaraj made a statement.
“(The) situation was such that we submitted our resignations but now D.K. Shivakumar and others came and requested us to withdraw resignations. I will speak to (rebel MLA) K. Sudhakar Rao and then see what is to be done. After all I have spent decades in Congress,” Nagaraj said.
Two other rebel MLAs, Roshan Baig and Ramalinga Reddy, have also said that they are not averse to withdrawing their resignations if their “problems” are resolved, said sources.
The indications are clear. Shivakumar may well be working his magic for the Congress yet again.
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The Congress troubleshooter
Shivakumar, by far, is the man his political opponents fear the most, especially the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), due to the Vokkaliga strongman’s use of money muscle, power and emotions.
In 2018, the BJP won 105 seats to become the single largest party in the Karnataka assembly while the Congress got only 78 seats and the JD(S) 37. Even as the BJP needed the support of 8 MLAs to cross the majority mark in the 224-member House, the Congress and the JD(S) struck a deal to stake claim to form the government.
With the Congress struggling at the time to find a foothold in most of the country, Shivakumar was given the charge to ensure that the Karnataka flock stayed together. He not only herded all the legislators to a resort but also took away their mobiles and watched over them like a hawk.
Even on the day of the trust vote moved by former CM and BJP leader B.S. Yeddyurappa, two MLAs — Pratap Gowda Patil and Anand Singh — were still dilly dallying about their support to the coalition. But Shivakumar swung into action to keep both of them in a hotel room until the the trust vote, only to make a dramatic arm-in-arm entry to ensure they voted for the Congress-JDS coalition.
This time too, with his party having received a drubbing in Lok Sabha elections, Shivakumar is trying every trick in the book to salvage the Congress-JDS coalition he fought for last year.
From constantly talking to rebel leaders over the phone, to meeting them at their home at the crack of dawn, to braving the rain outside a Mumbai hotel seeking time to meet the dissident MLAs holed up there — the Congress troubleshooter is doing it all.
On Wednesday, as Shivakumar stood outside the gates of Renaissance Hotel in Powai, he said, “I only have a heart that I have come to extend to my friends. I am not a terrorist… I have come to have a cup of tea in the hotel.
“So even if I were to collapse here without food, I don’t care. There is no question of leaving this place till I meet them.”
This came just a day after he narrowly missed to stop some MLAs in Bengaluru from being taken to Mumbai in a special flight allegedly hired by the BJP.
‘Corrupt’ but loyal
By now, Shivakumar, the seven-time MLA who earned the title ‘tiger of Sathanur’, is known for his relentless fighting spirit and loyalty to the party.
Last year, he made common cause with the Gowdas to keep out the BJP, and he did this despite sharing a long, chequered history with the JDS family.
In 1989, Shivakumar defeated then-Janata Dal leader H.D. Deve Gowda in Sathanur — four years after he first lost to Gowda from the same seat — and was called a ‘giant-killer’. This earned him a seat in the state cabinet.
Over the next two decades, he went up against Gowda and his son H.D. Kumaraswamy many times in a fight for Vokkaliga supremacy.
And while there is no love lost between him and Kumaraswamy, sources claim he told the disgruntled Congress MLAs last week that the party should abide by the coalition and allow the chief minister to stay on for five years.
However, not everything is agreeable with Shivakumar’s politics.
His meteoric politically — particularly during the S.M. Krishna-led state government in 1999 — saw him face several corruption charges, be it illegal granite mining, disproportionate assets, forgery, cheating, impersonation, tax evasion or criminal conspiracy.
In 2017, officials from the Income Tax department as well as the Enforcement Directorate claimed that the politician had around Rs 300 crore worth of undisclosed income while they simultaneously raided his properties in 60 locations spanning over Karnataka and Delhi. The state minister at the time was hosting 43 Gujarat MLAs at a Bengaluru resort to prevent defections.
Now, as the Congress feebly works to save one of its last states, Shivakumar is again proving to be key — a role he has played in the past, and with Congress’ dwindling fortunes in Karnataka, appears destined to repeat in the future.
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