Siddaramaiah's son prove to be 'Achilles Heel', but he is not the first one in Karnataka

BENGALURU: Sons have turned out to be the Achilles heel for chief ministers of Karnataka, as the incumbent, Siddaramaiah, is finding out. His son, Yathindra, is just the latest among those whose actions have reflected on their fathers.

Siddaramaiah is accused of nepotism in the awarding of a contract for a lab at the government-run Victoria Hospital in Bengaluru to a company, where Yathindra was a director. Yathindra has resigned from the post, but the contract has not been cancelled.

“Siddaramaiah should have cancelled the tender involving his son’s company as soon as the matter came to light. Yathindra might have resigned from the company, but that does not stop him from being a sleeping partner or counter the charges of nepotism,” political analyst S Mahadeva Prakash said.

Prakash said the earliest case of a CM dealing with disrepute over his son was that of Veerendra Patil in 1970, when his son Kailashnath, who later become a Congress MLA, was sent on a government-sponsored trip to Japan for an expo. “Kailashnath was running a small printing press, but he was sent on the trip as one of the youths representing Karnataka.

Opposition leaders like D Devaraj Urs, R Gundu Rao and others took serious exception to this and there was a mass movement called Expo Chaluvali against it. It was the first step to the downfall of the Veerendra Patil government then,” he told ET. This was followed by Veerendra Patil’s close friend, Ramakrishna Hegde, in 1985.