NEW DELHI: The storm over the chief ministerial post resurfaced again after Congress MLA H A Iqbal Hussain on Saturday claimed that D K Shivakumar will take over the top job on January 6.Hussain said that DKS should be made the chief minister and that CM Siddaramaiah should vacate the post for him. He predicted that “there is a 99 per cent chance” that DKS will become CM on January 6.
When asked about the significance of the date, he said, “I don’t know. It’s just a random number. Everybody is saying this. It can either be January 6 or 9. These are the two dates.”Hussain has been demanding that Shivakumar be made the chief minister. On Friday, he had made his wish public.This comes a day after DKS met over 30 Congress legislators and ministers for a dinner meeting late Thursday night in Belagavi, amid ongoing speculation about potential leadership changes in the state government.According to news agency PTI sources, the dinner gathering included prominent ministers K H Muniyappa, Mankal Vaidya and Dr M C Sudhakar, and several MLAs, including N A Haris, Ramesh Bandisiddegowda, H C Balakrishna, Ganesh Hukkeri, Darshan Dhruvanarayana, Ashok Kumar Rai and K Y Nanjegowda.As the Congress government reached the halfway mark in the state, reports quoting Congress sources suggested that MLAs and MLCs from Shivakumar’s faction had camped in Delhi to push the party high command to make him the next chief minister. DK Shivakumar further fuelled speculation after claiming that there had indeed been “a confidential understanding on leadership transition among five-six leaders” soon after the Congress won a landslide victory in the 2023 elections.The deputy chief minister made the first reference to the power pact but stopped short of divulging more details. “This is confidential. I don’t want to speak publicly on this,” he said.Amid the ongoing speculation, the party high command had recently instructed both Siddaramaiah and Shivakumar to meet over breakfast at each other’s residences. This move was seen as an attempt to pause the leadership tussle between the two leaders.These breakfast meetings were also interpreted as a signal of Siddaramaiah’s continuation as chief minister for the immediate future, particularly ahead of the Belagavi legislature session.
