Haradanahalli, and a household of farmers

Haradanahalli is a village in Holenarasipura taluk of Hassan district, in the old Malnad-edge country of southern Karnataka where irrigation from the Hemavati river turned dry fields into paddy and sugarcane. It is an unremarkable place except for one fact: it produced a family that has held both the office of Chief Minister of Karnataka and the office of Prime Minister of India. Haradanahalli Doddegowda Kumaraswamy was born there on 16 December 1959, a son of H. D. Deve Gowda and Chennamma. His father was then a rising figure in state politics who would go on to serve as Chief Minister of Karnataka and, in 1996, as Prime Minister.

The son was educated largely in Bengaluru rather than in the village. He attended school at an MES institution in Jayanagar, took his pre-university course at Vijaya College, and graduated with a bachelor's degree in science from National College, Basavanagudi. For much of his twenties and thirties he showed little appetite for the family business of politics, and moved instead into an industry that in Karnataka is closely entangled with public life.

From film business to Parliament

Kumaraswamy entered Kannada cinema as a distributor and exhibitor before turning producer, founding a banner named Channambika Films after his mother. Its first production was Surya Vamsha, directed by S. Narayan, and the company remained active for years afterwards, backing pictures including the 2016 action film Jaguar. The trade taught him something about distribution networks, cash flow and popular taste that would later be visible in the way he campaigned.

His first electoral success came in 1996, when he won the Kanakapura Lok Sabha seat. It was a false dawn. In the snap general election of 1998 he was heavily defeated on the same ground, losing his deposit, and spent the following years rebuilding a base rather than holding office. He returned to elected life in 2004, winning the Ramanagara assembly constituency in a state election that produced no majority and left the Janata Dal (Secular), by then his father's party, holding the balance.

Chief Minister, twice over

In early 2006 Kumaraswamy did the thing that made his reputation and permanently divided opinion about him. Breaking with the JD(S) alliance with the Congress, he led a group of party legislators into a coalition with the Bharatiya Janata Party on the basis of a twenty-month rotating arrangement, and was sworn in as Chief Minister of Karnataka in February 2006, aged forty-six. His government made a point of rural touring, and he cultivated an image as a leader accessible to farmers and villagers. The arrangement ended badly. When the agreed handover to the BJP's B. S. Yediyurappa fell due in October 2007, the transfer of power broke down, the government collapsed, and Karnataka passed into President's Rule. The episode cost the JD(S) heavily in the 2008 election.

He was elected to the Lok Sabha from Bangalore Rural in 2009 and returned to the assembly from Ramanagara in 2013. Then, in May 2018, another hung verdict handed him a second chance. The JD(S) had won only about three dozen seats, far fewer than either the BJP or the Congress, but a post-election understanding with the Congress made him Chief Minister once more, sworn in on 23 May 2018. He had contested and won from both Ramanagara and Channapatna. His single budget as coalition Chief Minister was built around a large agricultural loan waiver, but the government itself was unstable from the first week.

The 2019 collapse and the road back

The end came in July 2019. Sixteen legislators, thirteen from the Congress and three from his own party, resigned, and two independents withdrew support. After three weeks of political crisis, Kumaraswamy moved a confidence motion on 23 July 2019 and lost it, ninety-nine votes to one hundred and five. He resigned, and Yediyurappa returned as Chief Minister days later. The JD(S) was reduced further in the 2023 assembly election, and Kumaraswamy responded by taking the party into the National Democratic Alliance.

That alignment produced the most emphatic personal victory of his career. Contesting the Mandya Lok Sabha seat in 2024, he polled more than eight lakh votes and won by a very wide margin. On 10 June 2024 he was sworn in as Union Cabinet Minister for Heavy Industries and Steel, moving from state politics to a national portfolio covering the automobile and capital goods sectors and the public steel enterprises. He continues as state president of the JD(S).

Reputation and family

Kumaraswamy married Anitha in 1986; she has herself been an elected representative in Karnataka. Their son Nikhil has worked as an actor in Kannada films and has contested elections. Within Karnataka, Kumaraswamy is widely known as Kumaranna, elder brother Kumara, a form of address that reflects the strongly personal, region-rooted politics of the Vokkaliga heartland around Hassan, Mandya and Ramanagara from which the family draws its support.

Assessments of him vary sharply. Critics point to two truncated chief ministerships and a willingness to ally in almost any direction; supporters point out that he has twice led a third party into government in a state normally contested by two national ones, and that he has kept a regional formation alive when most such parties in southern India have been absorbed or extinguished. What is not in dispute is the trajectory: from a village in Hassan district, through a film distribution office in Bengaluru, to the chief ministership of a large state and a seat in the Union Cabinet.