Haradanahalli, a village in the Holenarasipura taluk of Hassan district in southern Karnataka, gave India its eleventh Prime Minister. Haradanahalli Doddegowda Deve Gowda was born there on 18 May 1933, when the region formed part of the princely Kingdom of Mysore under British suzerainty. He has carried the village in his name throughout a public career of more than six decades, and the agricultural concerns of that landscape — water, soil, the timing of the monsoon, the price of a crop — have remained the subjects he returns to most consistently in public life.

A farmer's son and an engineer

He was born into a family of cultivators, and farming was the assumed course of his life. He was educated locally and then took a diploma in civil engineering from the L. V. Polytechnic in Hassan in the early 1950s. The training mattered: for a young man from an agricultural district, civil engineering meant canals, tanks, bunds and dams, and it gave him a technical vocabulary for the irrigation questions that would occupy much of his later career. He worked for a period as a contractor before turning to politics full time.

He joined the Indian National Congress in 1953, at the age of twenty, and worked in local and district-level party structures for the rest of the decade. Karnataka in those years was being reorganised as a linguistic state, and the political ground was shifting rapidly beneath every established arrangement.

Three decades in the Karnataka assembly

In 1962 Deve Gowda was first elected to the Karnataka Legislative Assembly from the Holenarasipura constituency, contesting as an independent. He would hold that seat through successive terms across nearly three decades, an unusually long uninterrupted association between a legislator and a rural constituency.

His career in the assembly ran through the great realignments of Indian opposition politics. After the Congress split he was associated with Congress (O), and he served as Leader of the Opposition in the Karnataka assembly during the 1970s, a role that placed him at the centre of state politics during the Emergency years. When the Janata Party formed and later took power in Karnataka, he became a state president of the party and served as a minister in the government led by Ramakrishna Hegde from 1983, holding the public works and irrigation portfolios.

Irrigation was the work by which he became widely known. He pressed for the completion of long-delayed projects, for the extension of canal networks in dry districts, and for the settlement of Karnataka's share in interstate river disputes. The description "son of the soil" attached itself to him during these years, and it accurately reflected both the substance of his ministerial work and his political base among farming communities.

Chief Minister and Prime Minister

He became state president of the Janata Dal in 1994 and led the party to victory in the Karnataka assembly election of that year. He was sworn in as Chief Minister of Karnataka in December 1994, and his administration concentrated on irrigation, power generation and agricultural support, alongside the early stages of Bengaluru's growth as a technology centre.

His elevation to national office came unexpectedly. The general election of 1996 produced no majority, and a coalition of regional and left parties known as the United Front assembled to form a government with outside support from the Congress. Deve Gowda, who was not a member of the Lok Sabha at the time and who had not been a figure in national politics, was chosen as a compromise leader acceptable to the coalition's several components. He was sworn in as Prime Minister of India on 1 June 1996 and held office until 21 April 1997, when the Congress withdrew its support.

His government lasted a little under eleven months. Its programme reflected the federal composition of the coalition: attention to the concerns of the states, continuity in the economic reforms begun in 1991, and a Common Minimum Programme negotiated among the front's constituents. As Prime Minister he also gave sustained attention to agriculture and rural development, the subjects he knew best.

Janata Dal (Secular) and later years

After leaving office he remained active in national and state politics. Following further splits in the Janata Dal, he founded the Janata Dal (Secular) in July 1999 and has led it since, building it into a party with a durable base in the southern districts of Karnataka. The party has at various times participated in coalition governments in the state and has held seats in Parliament through successive general elections.

He was returned to the Lok Sabha over several terms, most often from the Hassan constituency that adjoins his birthplace, and he served in the house across a long stretch of the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. In 2020 he was elected to the Rajya Sabha from Karnataka. In Parliament he has spoken most frequently on irrigation, river-water sharing, drought relief, crop pricing and the condition of small farmers — a consistency of subject matter rare over so long a career.

He married Chennamma in 1954. Several members of his family have entered public life, and the Janata Dal (Secular) has remained closely associated with them.

Place in public life

Deve Gowda's career is notable for its span. He entered elected office in 1962, in a state that had only recently been reorganised, and remained in Parliament into the 2020s; few Indians have held continuous public office across so much of the republic's history. He is also one of a small number of Indians to have served both as Chief Minister of a state and as Prime Minister of the country.

For his birthplace, the fact of the association is itself significant. Haradanahalli is a modest agricultural village of the Hassan uplands, and its name has travelled, as a matter of ordinary usage, into the record of the Indian premiership. That a farmer's son from such a village could reach the office at all is part of the plain constitutional arithmetic of Indian democracy, and it remains among the most frequently cited illustrations of it.