Bengaluru: When he was snapping ties with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in December 2022, a disgruntled Gali Janardhana Reddy claimed the Central Bureau of Investigation’s (CBI) raid on his family in 2018 was the “last straw”. The CBI team forced the family to pose together for a picture, the mining baron had said.
“This humiliation happening despite the BJP being in power it the state and at the Centre was the last straw,” he said.
Fifteen months later, this rancour appears forgotten. Reddy, the MLA from Gangavathi, has now merged his Kalyana Rajya Pragathi Paksha (KRPP) with the BJP, even saying that he was happy to be back “home” and that he had returned home to support Narendra Modi’s bid to become the prime minister for a third term “in the interest of the nation”.
Speaking to reporters after being formally reinducted into the BJP this week, Reddy said he “chose to return to the BJP. “It does feel good to be back home. I will faithfully discharge whatever responsibility the party vests in me. I will campaign for all our Lok Sabha candidates (in the state),” he said.
To the BJP, the mining baron’s homecoming marks a triumph just ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. Synonymous with money and might, Reddy brings key strength to the party even though he’s not allowed back into his home district of Ballari — an embargo placed on him by the Supreme Court while granting him bail in an illegal iron ore mining case in 2015.
Despite the allegations, however, Reddy, once a powerful minister in the Karnataka cabinet, continues to hold much sway over Ballari, one of the state’s most back backward regions, where the Congress won all five assembly seats in the 2023 assembly polls.
“People here never cared for the laws he allegedly broke because he built homes for the poor, gave them jobs, and helped anyone who sought him out,” Basavaraj. B, a small-time merchant in the mineral-rich district, told ThePrint.
It’s exactly this popularity that the BJP, which won 25 of Karnataka’s 28 seats in the 2019 general election, hopes to exploit, according to political analysts. The party lost the 2023 election to the state’s 224-member assembly and was reduced to 65 seats.
Bringing Reddy back into its fold indicates that the party is “insecure” in Karnataka, A. Narayana, a faculty member at Azim Premji University, said.
“(It’s) part of a national trend (in case of) the BJP. But in Karnataka, it shows that the BJP is nervous and does not feel as secure as it does in other states,” he said.
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Chequered past
While he joined the BJP Monday, Reddy was flanked by former Karnataka chief minister B.S. Yediyurappa and his MLA son B.Y. Vijayendra, the state BJP president. This was in stark contrast to when Reddy, a cabinet minister under the BJP government in 2008, led a campaign against the father-son duo when Yediyurappa was still chief minister.
Reddy and his brothers — G. Karunakara Reddy and G. Somashekhara Reddy — have been a powerful force in Karnataka politics, even though they were born across the border, in Chittoor district of undivided Andhra Pradesh. Both his brothers are with the BJP.
Reddy’s close aide, B. Sriramulu, is the BJP’s candidate in the Bellary Lok Sabha constituency. According to residents in the area, Reddy’s astronomical rise came despite the mining allegations. They also recall the time when the Reddy brothers travelled on a scooter and were nothing more than local money lenders.
“In the late 1990s, all three of them travelled in the same car. But they got into illegal mining, exploited the sector, and grew exponentially,” said Rajashekar, an advocate and activist from the region.
After this, their fortunes changed. Under the patronage of the late BJP leader Sushma Swaraj, the Reddy brothers gained political prominence — in 1999, they helmed Swaraj’s high-decibel campaign against then Congress president Sonia Gandhi.
After illegal mining allegations flew in 2011, Swaraj, like many others in her party, distanced herself from the trio.
In 2012, the Congress, led by now Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and Deputy Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar, held a 320-km padayatra from Bengaluru to Ballari (then Bellary) to highlight corruption allegations against then BJP government — not only the illegal mining but also a land scam allegation against Yediyurappa. The allegations eventually led to the collapse of the first ever BJP government in South India.
In December 2022 — months before the Karnataka assembly polls — Reddy floated his own party, the KRPP.
At that time, he also accused Union Home Minister Amit Shah of “unleashing” central agencies on him in September 2018. “He (Shah) told me that I would be given an office-bearer’s post soon after the elections but instead my home was raided by the CBI (Central Bureau of Investigation),” he told reporters at the time.
His political gambit worked somewhat — Reddy, who fought the election on a football symbol, won the Gangavathi assembly seat in Koppal. His wife Aruna Lakshmi, however, wasn’t as successful, having contested the election against her brother-in-law, Somashekhara Reddy of the BJP, as well as Bharat Reddy of the Congress, who ultimately won.
Mining allegations, arrest, and rearrest
In 2015, Reddy, who was first taken into CBI custody over the illegal mining allegations in 2011, was rearrested by a Special Investigation Team constituted by the Karnataka Lokayukta in the mining case.
The arrest came four years after a Lokayukta report detailed the extent of the alleged mining scam and the loss it caused, not only monetarily but also in terms of environmental degradation.
Until the report set off a chain of events that eventually led to his arrest and downfall, Reddy and his brothers maintained an iron grip over every aspect of administrative and political affairs of the region. Such was their hold for a decade that the then Lokayukta, Justice N. Santosh Hegde, had called it the “Republic of Bellary”.
They were significant players in the Karnataka political scene, too.
After the assembly polls in 2008, when the BJP secured 110 seats in the elections but fell three short of a majority in the 224-member assembly, the Reddy brothers were rumoured to have launched a now infamous poaching exercise, ‘Operation Kamala’, to secure the support of six Independents and opposition MLAs.
It was also Janardhana Reddy who has been credited with starting the trend of what is now known as “resort politics” in 2009, when he whisked away 40 BJP legislators to a resort near Bengaluru to demand that Yediyurappa stem down.
Since his rearrest in 2015 and the CBI action in 2018, Reddy had never quite been able to recover his political footing with the BJP. It was in the context of this political sidelining that Reddy launched his party in 2022.
In June last year, a special court in Bengaluru ordered the attachment of at least 77 properties owned by the Gangavathi MLA and his wife Aruna in connection with the illegal mining case.
Reddy is facing several charges, including those of disproportionate assets, illegal mining, altering state boundaries, money laundering, intimidation, and allegations under environmental laws. Some of these cases are still being heard in various courts across the state and the country.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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