Signing you in

There is a power transition in the Congress government in Karnataka: Siddaramaiah has made way for D K Shivakumar. Whatever the internal rifts and rivalries between the two, the transition has taken place as smoothly as turning over a page. That was quite unexpected and quite uncharacteristic of Siddaramaiah.

In his entire career as a politician, Siddaramaiah has never responded well to losing power. He has demonstrated both restlessness and recklessness when he has either been denied power or lost it. This first became clear in 1996, when he challenged the choice of J H Patel as chief minister; then in 2004, when he challenged Dharam Singh’s elevation. In 2005, he was expelled from the Janata Dal (Secular) by H D Deve Gowda for anti-party activities. When he joined Congress, he challenged Mallikarjun Kharge in 2008 for the opposition leader’s chair in the state assembly. In 2013, Siddaramaiah successfully staked a claim to become chief minister, dislodging Kharge, the claimant to the chair. After losing power in 2018, he brought down the Congress-JDS coalition government in 2019 when he allowed some of his men to cross over to the BJP and prop up B S Yediyurappa as the chief minister.

The streak continued when, in 2023, Siddaramaiah checkmated Shivakumar to wrest the chief minister’s chair, even if it was the latter who had led the party to a stellar victory. Again in 2025, his power play became apparent when he did not transfer power as per the original agreement with the Congress high command. He instead pleaded for an extension in the name of breaking Devaraj Urs’s record as the longest-serving chief minister. That was flimsy reasoning because Urs’s tenure was an unbroken term of nearly eight years that included an election-free Emergency.

This track record and his single-minded pursuit of power made Siddaramaiah seem like he was driven less by ideology or principles, although his aggressive political branding tells us an entirely different story. Every time he contested or led JDS or Congress in an election, the claims of his wide social base were exposed by the voteshare he was able to get for himself as a candidate or for his party. The BJP grew manifold despite his active presence in Karnataka politics and consolidated its vote share. Even when Congress won big in 2023 with the novelty of “guarantee” welfarism, the BJP’s vote share remained intact. In fact, the BJP had expanded to newer territories at the expense of both the Congress and the JDS.

When such is Siddaramaiah’s history, a question that continues to circle as he steps down is why he walked away so meekly this time. Has age chastened him? Was he outmanoeuvred by the high command that prominently includes Kharge? In the brutal sport of Karnataka politics, nothing can be ruled out. One now has to wait and see if Siddaramaiah will occupy the backbenches to make a success of Shivakumar and the Congress.

Outside of these power games and interpersonal rivalries, this transition signifies a few other fundamental shifts in the political terrain. Congress cannot settle for Shivakumar as the face of change, but he may lead the transition to a more universal game that the party is not entirely unfamiliar with. It is not a question of choice; it is about the winds of political circumstance. This universal game may not be about relying on anachronistic caste identity politics alone, but about building broader demographic coalitions, like the one we saw happen suddenly, and accidentally, in neighbouring Tamil Nadu, where Congress has rushed to align with C Joseph Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam.

In the age of sub-caste politics, caste as a category does not yield the same dividends as before. It can only be a contributing factor. Therefore, the exit of Siddaramaiah, the decline of Nitish Kumar, the dismantling of Lalu Prasad Yadav are only symbolic of a new politics that is emerging with new demographics in control of the political field. The contours of the new game are unfolding with great speed, and Karnataka cannot buck the trend. Shivakumar fits the transition perfectly because he is label-free, unlike Siddaramaiah.

As Shivakumar moves in, the Congress may consider refining his label-free, pragmatic political style into something more winnable by 2028, when Karnataka goes to the polls, and in 2029, when the general elections will be held. Unlike Shivakumar, who has the image of an unabashed businessman, a networker and a money-manager, Siddaramaiah had branded himself as a rooted socialist, as unflinchingly secular, as a saviour of backward communities. Those labels may now become glorious artefacts in an uncurated museum of politics, and wait in the margins to be fact-checked by history.

The writer is a senior journalist and author of The Conscious Network: A Chronicle of Resistance to a Dictatorship