'Troubleshooter' D K Shivakumar: Congress' last 'resort' in Karnataka

D  K Shivakumar has just taken over as chief of the Karnataka unit of the Congress. Who is he? And does it even matter?

When he filed his affidavit for the 2018 Karnataka Assembly election, Shivakumar and his wife declared assets amounting to Rs 730 crore. He listed his profession as "social worker". He could have written anything, but in south Karnataka (as elsewhere in India) the currency of power is land and caste. Shivakumar is a Vokkaliga, born into an agricultural family from the same region as H D Deve Gowda, the tallest leader of the Vokkaligas in the state. It was only natural that Deve Gowda should view Shivakumar as a cheeky upstart and for a long time, he did.
 

Shivakumar has always been in the Congress since he joined the Youth Congress when he was in college.  He was general secretary of the Youth Congress in the state between 1983 and 1985.
 

Shivakumar contested against Deve Gowda for the first time in Sathanur in 1985. Not unexpectedly, he lost, albeit by a narrow margin which, in itself, was not a small feat because Deve Gowda was then a senior minister in the Ramakrishna Hegde government. But Deve Gowda, who had contested in two seats, chose to vacate the Sathanur, which  Shivakumar contested in the by-election and won in the by-election. Thus began a battle with the Deve Gowda family which has changed its look and shape but has remained, in essence, exactly what it was: A battle.

Shivakumar began building his influence in the rural areas adjoining Bengaluru (then Bangalore). At around this time, land prices began rising. Shivakumar also invested in mining and allied business. He contested the 1989 Assembly elections as an independent candidate and won. He became the youngest minister in the state just two years later, serving as minister of state under then Chief Minister S Bangarappa from 1991 to 1992.

Then came the government led by S M Krishna in 1999. He forged a good relationship with Krishna — and is alleged to be involved in some of the Café Coffee Day business with Krishna’s late son in law, VG Siddhartha. So far, he has been MLA seven times. Along with his business interests, his political hard work (a bit of coercion and oppression also works) has paid off spectacularly.

Shivakumar has used personal wealth to earn political capital. These stories are well known: In 2002, when the then Maharashtra CM and Congress leader, the late Vilasrao Deshmukh, had all but lost the government in a no-confidence motion, it was Shivakumar, urban development minister in Karnataka at the time, who corralled MLAs and lodged them at Eagleton Resort (walls of which if they could speak, would yield many secrets) and led them to Mumbai on the day of the vote.

In 2017, Ahmad Patel won his Rajya Sabha seat from Gujarat because of the efforts put in by Shivakumar to keep 44 MLAs from the state “safe”. Later still, he used his business relationships in Hyderabad to ferry MLAs from Bengaluru to a Hyderabad resort, asking Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao for nothing more than that they are kept safe and secure. That’s how Yediyurappa, despite having 104 MLAs of 224 and the BJP being the single-largest party in the Karnataka Assembly, was forced to yield space to H D Kumaraswamy and the Congress. In this operation, Shivakumar beat Amit Shah at the game, although Shah had the last laugh when Yediyurappa was re-installed in power.

The Deve Gowda clan and Shivakumar have never really been friends, only tactical partners. Unlike many others in the Congress, Shivakumar was someone Kumaraswamy thought he could do business with. Hence the loud lament from the Janata Dal (Secular) about the misuse of probe agencies when Shivakumar was arrested on money laundering charges by the Enforcement Directorate in September last year. He was granted bail within a month and the ED got a tongue-lashing by Justice Suresh Kait when the ED lawyer failed to turn up at the hearing. The Congress might want to have a back-up for him in the state.