I have seen this film before.
A Congress Chief Minister, popular, elected, rooted in his state, is summoned to Delhi. There are meetings. Back-to-back meetings. Venugopal is in the room. Surjewala is in the room. Rahul Gandhi is in the room. The high command has decided. The Chief Minister returns home, calls a press conference, thanks the leadership for the opportunity to serve, and resigns.
His supporters gather outside and weep.
This time it was Siddaramaiah. A 78-year-old man who has given his life to Karnataka politics. Two terms as Chief Minister. The architect of the Ahinda coalition — backward classes, minorities, and Dalits — that brought Congress back from the dead in Karnataka in 2023. A mass leader of the old school, the kind India produces less and less of.
The high command offered him a Rajya Sabha seat as consolation. He declined. He said he has no interest in national politics. He went home.
But here is where today's column parts ways with the familiar script.
This time, the high command got it right.
They got it right because D.K. Shivakumar should have been Chief Minister from day one. And they got it late, three years late, but they got it. That matters. It does not erase the delay. But it matters.
Let us talk about what D.K. Shivakumar actually did to deserve this.
He rebuilt Karnataka Congress from rubble. As KPCC president from 2020, he traveled every district, mobilized every booth, raised funds, settled disputes, and held a fractious party together through years of opposition when lesser men would have given up or defected. When the 2023 campaign began, it was Shivakumar's organizational machinery that delivered the ground operation. Siddaramaiah supplied the welfare idiom, the guarantee schemes, the Ahinda coalition. Shivakumar supplied everything else. The legs. The logistics. The money. The nerve.
He also paid a price that very few politicians in India have paid.
When the BJP came to him and offered him the Deputy Chief Minister's post in exchange for switching sides, he said no. They put him in Tihar Jail instead, 50 days in Delhi's prison on money laundering charges. When the 2023 results came in and Congress won 135 seats, Shivakumar broke down on camera. Sobbing. Almost unable to speak. Remembering Tihar. Remembering what he had given up and what he had refused to give up.
That is not a politician performing emotion. That is a man who paid in full and knew it.
He should have been Chief Minister in May 2023. The high command blinked. They gave Siddaramaiah the chair because he had the larger MLA count behind him, because he was the safer political choice, because Siddaramaiah, and let us be honest about this, is a shrewd and ruthless operator who knows exactly how to count heads and apply pressure at the right moment.
Siddaramaiah is not a victim. Let us be clear about that.
He is one of the most calculating politicians Karnataka has produced. He knew the power-sharing agreement existed. He knew DK had been promised his turn. And he spent three years making himself as difficult to remove as possible, consolidating loyalists in the cabinet, in the party apparatus, in the bureaucracy. He did not go quietly. He had to be pushed.
And before he was pushed, he did something that this column cannot ignore.
Roshan Baig was a seven-time MLA. The most senior Muslim face in Karnataka Congress. A man who had won from Shivajinagar through seven consecutive elections, through Congress governments and opposition years alike. He was a minister in Siddaramaiah's own cabinet.
When Siddaramaiah returned to power in 2023, Baig was denied a cabinet berth. When Baig asked for a Lok Sabha ticket from Bangalore Central, he was denied that too. When he finally spoke up, when he said publicly that Siddaramaiah's decision was costing the party, that Muslims were being taken for granted, that the community was getting one Lok Sabha ticket while three seats went to Kuruba candidates, he was suspended from the party.
He said it himself, with the clarity of a man with nothing left to lose: "I am a worker of Indian National Congress. Not Siddu Congress." That sentence should haunt every Congress leader in Karnataka.
Because what Baig was describing — the takeover of a state party by one man's personal network, the sidelining of communities and leaders who did not carry his loyalty stamp, the conversion of a broad coalition into a personal fiefdom — is exactly what Siddaramaiah's tenure looked like from the inside. The Ahinda coalition that he built and claimed credit for was also a coalition he managed for his own political survival, not purely for the communities it was meant to serve.
This is Siddaramaiah's record. Not just the guarantee schemes, which were real and significant, but also this.
Now DK Shivakumar takes over. He is capable. He is battle-hardened. He has earned this. Karnataka under him has a genuine chance to show what Congress governance looks like when the Chief Minister is also the man who built the machine.
But DK must go in with his eyes open.
Siddaramaiah is not retiring. He is not going to the Rajya Sabha. He is staying in Karnataka politics, with his loyalists still embedded in the cabinet, in the legislature party, in the party organization. He has already said he will remain active. A man that shrewd, with that much invested, does not simply step aside and wish his successor well.
The high command must keep Siddaramaiah on a short leash until the 2028 Karnataka elections. Any attempt to destabilize DK's government, any whispering campaign, any manufactured crisis, any sudden discovery of principle on issues where Siddaramaiah was silent for three years, must be read for what it is and dealt with accordingly.
DK needs to watch his back. Not because Siddaramaiah is his enemy, they are colleagues, perhaps even friends in the way Karnataka politicians are friends. But because Siddaramaiah is Siddaramaiah. He has been in politics for 50 years. He did not survive five decades by being sentimental about power.
The high command did the right thing this week. They honored a promise. They gave a deserving man his due. They are three years late, but they arrived.
Now they must stay alert.
Because in Karnataka Congress, the film is never really over. The credits roll, the lights come on, and somewhere in the back of the theatre, Siddaramaiah is already reading the script for the sequel.
(Disclaimer: Akhlaq Siddiqi, a columnist, is a long-time resident of the Washington, D.C., area. His interests include politics, films, and the stock market. Views expressed in the column are his own and do not reflect those of IB Times India.)
