New Delhi:
The curtain fell Thursday afternoon.
After eight years and eight days as the Chief Minister of Karnataka, spread across two non-continuous terms, Congress veteran and ‘leader of the masses’ Siddaramaiah stepped down from the state’s top job.
He will be replaced by his deputy – DK Shivakumar – perhaps as early as Saturday, and the Congress will look ahead to 2028 and an Assembly election the party would rather not lose.
And Siddaramaiah, if what sources told NDTV is correct, could move up to the Rajya Sabha with a view to stepping into a national role for the party ahead of the 2029 Lok Sabha election.
Thus was the Congress’ Karnataka leadership squabble – a Siddaramaiah vs Shivakumar showdown that has plagued it over the past three years, bringing its government to the edge of disaster more than once and leaving it open to rival BJP’s jibes – resolved, at least for now.
Siddaramaiah, the chief minister
The 80-year-old wrote himself into the history books in January 2026 when he surpassed D Devaraj Urs to become the state’s longest-serving chief minister, a record some say he always had his eye on as he adroitly deflected ‘quit, now’ pressure from DKS’ camp in the months prior.
That he held fast to the job through that pressure – apparently unfazed even as the Congress government teetered – underlined the influence he wields within the party, influence that meant even the Gandhis, who recognised the switch had to be made, were hesitant to force the issue.
In electoral politics influence of that magnitude means only one thing – Siddaramaiah commands votes, lots of them. Specifically, it is rooted in support from the Ahinda communities, which is the collective term for voters from marginalised and minority groups.
The Ahinda bloc represents between 65 and 70 per cent of the state’s voters, and Siddaramaiah’s control of that bank has always been critical for the Congress, mostly because it allowed the party to circumvent an otherwise bi-polar Lingayat vs Vokkaliga landscape.
And it helped Siddaramaiah become chief minister twice.
The first was in 2013 when he became Karnataka’s 22nd chief minister, leading the Congress in a triumphant return to power. The first term was marked by a slew of welfare initiatives and schemes, which would become the bedrock of a ‘man of the masses’ persona to carry him through the next 13 years.
These schemes included the ‘Bhagya’ collective that included providing poor families with 10kg of rice and subsidised oil, lentils, salt, and sugar. Despite the spending that entailed – which drew objections from the opposition BJP – Siddaramaiah had a reputation for fiscal prudence.
But Siddaramaiah’s two terms have also been marked by corruption allegations, including the Mysuru Urban Development Authority land scam that broke into public view in 2024. The allegation was 14 plots of land had been allotted to his wife, Parvathi, in an upmarket Mysuru area in exchange for 3.16 acres elsewhere. The exchange, critics said, cost the state crores of rupees.
Both Siddaramaiah and his wife were eventually cleared of all charges.
Siddaramaiah, the man
Born in April 1948 to a farmer from the Kuruba caste, young Siddaramaiah’s political career may have been lost to the hardships of daily life in a remote Mysuru village, had not a passing folk dance troupe kindled a desire for education.
“I had not joined primary school… but the teacher in our dance group would make us all sit on the ground and teach us Kannada. It was because of this that I developed an interest in education,” he told a TV channel a few years earlier.
Years later he graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree and left Mysore University with another in law, which he earned despite his father’s insistence he study medicine.
Siddaramaiah, the rising politician
In the Karnataka of the 1960s and 1970s, Siddaramaiah’s formative years, socialism was the buzzword, with the philosophy of Dr Ram Manohar Lohia impressing young men and women, including the future chief minister.
Siddaramaiah began participating in movements and was also drawn to then-chief minister Devaraj Urs’ challenge to the Lingayat-Vokkaliga dominance.
A political career was inevitable at this point and it arrived in 1978 after he was elected a district official to the Mysuru Taluk Development Board.
Five years later he became an MLA for the first time, winning the Chamundeshwari seat as an independent candidate. Siddaramaiah would go on to win that seat four more times – thrice with the Janata Dal and once with the Congress.
Siddaramaiah joined the Janata Dal in 1985 and rose through the ranks swiftly; in 1988 he became the Transport Minister and though the Janata Dal was beaten the following year, it and he returned to the top in 1994. And this time he was made the Finance Minister.
But by the early 2000s Siddaramaiah, who had added a stint as deputy chief minister to an increasingly impressive resume, realised the Janata Dal was not his ticket to even greener pastures because party boss HD Deve Gowda was grooming his son, HD Kumaraswamy.
He left in 2004 and spent a year cultivating the Ahinda vote base, an astute move as it gave him a significant ace to play when he joined the Congress in 2006, helping him establish himself as a high-profile leader and a valuable electoral asset.
Over the next seven years he grew that base, leading state-wide foot marches to drum up support and deliver a big win in the 2013 election.
By this time, Siddaramaiah wasn’t just a rising politician. He had arrived.
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