A week after the party’s resounding victory in the 2023 Assembly election, Congress leaders Siddaramaiah and DK Shivakumar were sworn in as the new chief minister and deputy chief minister of Karnataka on Saturday morning. Eight Congress MLAs took their oaths as ministers, including the son of party leader Mallikarjun Kharge and former deputy chief minister G Parameshwara.
MB Patil, KH Muniyappa, KJ George, Satish Jarkiholi, Ramalinga Reddy, and BZ Zameer Ahmed Khan also took the oath today. When Siddaramaiah and Shivakumar were at odds, Patil and Parameshwara were considered potential candidates for the position of chief minister.
Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Mallikarjun Kharge, and other prominent figures were present on stage. Sonia Gandhi, the former party leader who is credited with breaking the Siddaramaiah-Shivakumar impasse and persuading the latter to accept a No. 2 role, was not present.
A phalanx of opposition leaders, including Nitish Kumar and Tejashwi Yadav, the chief minister and deputy chief minister of Bihar, Sharad Pawar, the president of the Nationalist Congress Party, and Farooq Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti, the former chief ministers of Jammu and Kashmir, attended the swearing-in ceremony, a lavish event held at Bengaluru’s Sri Kanteerava Stadium.
Along with actor-politician Kamal Haasan, other attendees included Tamil Nadu chief minister MK Stalin, as well as the governors of all other states ruled by the Congress, including Bhupesh Baghel of Chhattisgarh, Sukhwinder Singh Sukhu of Himachal Pradesh, and Ashok Gehlot of Rajasthan.
Arvind Kejriwal, the chief minister of Delhi, and K Chandrashekhar Rao, the chief minister of Telangana, were notable omissions from this massive opposition party show of strength ahead of the general election of 2024.
Both the Aam Aadmi Party and the Bharat Rashtra Samithi leaders have been promoted for a potential run at the position of prime minister next year, each being hailed as the leader of a ‘third front’ – a non-Congress, non-BJP coalition of regional parties.
