BENGALURU: The Karnataka Congress is in damage-control mode. Two days after the cabinet expansion, AICC in-charge Randeep Singh Surjewala and KPCC president Hariprasad BK are visiting veteran leaders who were dropped from the ministry—HK Patil, Dinesh Gundu Rao and TB Jayachandra—to soothe ruffled feathers and counsel patience.
“They are senior leaders of the party and I am speaking to them,” Hariprasad told TNIE. They would be visiting more leaders on Thursday as part of their crisis management strategy.
In Hulkoti, anger over HK Patil’s exclusion is palpable. Dinesh Gundu Rao has publicly said no one explained why he was dropped, and his supporters in Gandhinagar, Bengaluru, are unhappy that he has been left out. Aland MLA BR Patil posted a letter to his supporters, insisting that he had “not lost hope” while cataloguing 50 years of political work, including his role in the Aland ‘vote theft’ case that Rahul Gandhi carried nationally.
The list of disappointed MLAs is long. Senior leaders RV Deshpande and M Krishnappa are among several who have not been accommodated, and the party says it hopes to reach out to each one of them, an exercise which could take at least a month.
The containment plan is two-fold: Senior leaders are privately advising disappointed legislators to stay off social media and instead work for a Congress win in 2028, even as the high command’s own emissaries make house calls. The scale of the outreach effort is itself being read as an admission of how badly the reshuffle has landed.
“Perception-wise, it is a major setback for the party, it’s very bad optics,” said political analyst BS Murthy, pointing to top functionaries pacifying the party’s senior leadership rather than campaigning on governance.
Veterans like HK Patil, BR Patil and Jayachandra aren’t just sulking MLAs, each has built caste and community networks, and local credibility strong enough to influence outcomes beyond their own assembly seats, and can carry two or three neighbouring constituencies along for the party. A leader who feels discarded after decades of loyalty has little incentive to mobilise his network for the party in 2028.
The party’s problem now is that goodwill visits by Surjewala and Hariprasad can manage optics, but cannot drum up enthusiasm these leaders’ cadres bring to a campaign. The anger and grumblings in Hulkoti, Aland and Gandhinagar, besides Jayachandra’s silence, could make a difference in vote share across a dozen constituencies during elections.
For now, the Congress leadership is hoping that a month of patient, one-on-one conversations can undo the damage. While the math will be clear only in 2028, the optics are already a problem today.