DKS set to form Government

Karnataka swearing-in ceremony to take place on June 3

Karnataka Congress President DK Shivakumar, after being elected leader of the legislature party on Saturday, called on Karnataka Governor Thaawarchand Gehlot and staked a claim to form a Government.

Shivakumar was accompanied by outgoing Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and AICC general secretaries KC Venugopal and Randeep Singh Surjewala. Shivakumar’s swearing-in as the new CM will take place on June 3 at the Glass House of Lok Bhavan.

Shivakumar served as the Deputy Chief Minister in the Siddaramaiah Government. Siddaramaiah resigned as Chief Minister on Thursday, and Karnataka Governor Thaawarchand Gehlot accepted his resignation the next day and dissolved the Council of Ministers. However, the CLP meeting to elect the new leader took a ten-minute break, and top leaders, including Siddaramaiah, Venugopal and Surjewala, huddled in a separate room, sources said.

Announcing Shivakumar’s election as CLP leader, Karnataka Congress said in a statement that Siddaramaiah proposed Shivakumar’s name for the top position, G Parameshwara seconded the proposal, and the meeting unanimously endorsed it. Party general secretary (Organisation) KC Venugopal announced Shivakumar’s election as the new CLP leader.

Earlier, at the beginning of the meeting, Surjewala announced that the process of electing the new CLP leader would proceed based on a proposal from Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, and formally initiated the proceedings.

Subsequently, the newly elected CLP leader, Shivakumar, moved a resolution praising the services rendered by outgoing leader Siddaramaiah during his tenure as Chief Minister and sought the meeting’s support, the statement said, adding that the resolution was unanimously approved.

Popularly called ‘Kanakapura Bande’ — the granite rock of Kanakapura — the Assembly segment he represents, Shivakumar has also earned the reputation of being the Congress party’s ‘troubleshooter’.

Over the years, the 64-year-old leader steadily positioned himself as the Congress party’s principal Vokkaliga strongman.

The Vokkaligas are among Karnataka’s dominant agrarian communities. The Congress high command tested Shivakumar’s political management skills in 2017 by assigning him the responsibility of safeguarding 42 Gujarat Congress MLAs in Bengaluru ahead of the Rajya Sabha elections to prevent cross-voting. He lived up to the expectations of the party leadership, as Congress candidate Ahmed Patel won the election in Gujarat.

His organisational skills, political resilience and commitment to the party impressed the Congress high command, which appointed him Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee president in 2020. Shivakumar took charge at a difficult phase for the Congress in Karnataka. The party had performed poorly in the 2018 Assembly elections, and the setback deepened in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, when the Congress managed to win just one of 28 seats in the state amid the Narendra Modi wave.