Prateek Tanmay
2 min readBengaluruJun 4, 2026 05:08 AM IST
Ending suspense on who will succeed Karnataka CM D K Shivakumar as president of the state unit of the Congress, the AICC on Wednesday appointed senior leader and MLC B K Hariprasad for the post.
Hariprasad, who is an OBC leader from the Billava community, has been associated with the Congress since the late 80s. He is a four-time Rajya Sabha MP, starting from 1990 and his last election to the Upper House was in 2014.
Subsequently, he was elected to the Karnataka Legislative Council in 2020. He was picked for a second term in the Council from July 2026 by the Congress leadership earlier in the day. He is also a permanent invitee to the CWC.
A leader close to the Gandhi family, Hariprasad courted controversy last October when he dubbed RSS as ‘Indian Taliban’. He, along with Karnataka minister Priyank Kharge, had consistently attacked RSS over the last few months calling for the organisation’s registration and its source of income to be revealed to the public.
Hariprasad’s choice for the post is also seen as a counter for Shivakumar, due to his careful ‘soft Hindutva’ stance as evidenced during the swearing-in ceremony.
Shivakumar had kept an image of his family deity at the swearing-in stage, which he bowed to seconds before taking oath as CM.
Picking the OBC leader of Billava community, who form a deciding factor in several constituencies of coastal Karnataka, is also seen as a move to attract the caste group – voters of which have aligned largely with the BJP in recent decades.
