After grappling for over 100 hours with a predicament it had faced in Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan in December 2018, that of deciding the chief ministerial chair between two competing party leaders, the Congress on Thursday afternoon announced Siddaramaiah as its Karnataka chief minister and state unit president D K Shivakumar as the sole deputy CM.
Shivakumar will continue as Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee chief until Lok Sabha elections, said Congress general secretary K C Venugopal. In Rajasthan in December 2018, the party elected Ashok Gehlot as the Chief Minister and appointed Sachin Pilot as its deputy CM. Pilot was the state unit chief of the Congress too and quit both posts later. But with the Congress scoring a far more comprehensive win in Karnataka, as it had in Chhattisgarh, the party would hope its numbers in the legislative assembly would be a bulwark against any coup.
Karnataka’s new council of ministers will take the oath of office on Saturday afternoon, an event that will showcase opposition unity with the Congress in the process of inviting leaders of "like-minded parties" to attend.
According to sources, Kharge received former party chief Sonia Gandhi's help, with Rahul Gandhi pitching in, to resolve the Siddaramaiah versus Shivakumar conundrum in the former's favour. With Shivakumar unwilling to be one of three possible deputy CMs, the leadership proposed he would be the only leader to occupy that post. At the same time, Siddaramaiah gets an uninterrupted run, at least until the next Lok Sabha elections. One of the proposals the party discussed was that the two share the five years of chief ministerial chair.
Venugopal described the Karnataka election as a "poor versus rich" battle and sought to defend the over four days taken by his party to decide upon the CM. Venugopal said the central observers met each of the party MLAs to take their views on the subject on May 14 until the morning of May 15, which they conveyed to the Congress president later that day. While the party has not made the numbers public, according to party sources, Siddaramaiah led Shivakumar by a significant margin in the secret ballot conducted on May 14.
Venugopal said the Congress is a democratic party, not a dictatorship, and believes in consensus. He said both Siddaramaiah and Shivakumar deserved to be the CM. Kharge had a series of discussions with the two leaders and took the opinion of Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi before reaching the decision.
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