DK Shivakumar held a copy of the Constitution as he took oath on Wednesday, June 4. Within hours, he’d promised free bus passes to every student in Karnataka. By Thursday morning, he was telling IAS officers to ignore political pressure. The body language was of a man who had waited three years and didn’t intend to lose a day.
The Cabinet list says someone else is still running the room.
What the Free Bus Passes Were Really About
The first Cabinet meeting cleared a six-point youth agenda inside 24 hours: free passes for ALL students on non-luxury government buses (extending the Shakti scheme Siddaramaiah built), recruitment for 56,000 government posts, 10,000 “Bharat Jodo” youth clubs at ₹10 lakh each, and ₹2,000 crore for Bengaluru’s roads with a three-to-four month deadline. The fresh tab runs above ₹3,000 crore — on top of the ₹1.40 lakh crore in guarantee schemes the state is already carrying.
“This is D.K. Shivakumar’s government,” he said when asked who’d foot the bill. The next Karnataka election is two years away. Every line item is a campaign plank dressed as governance.
The portfolios tell a different story.
Who Actually Got the Levers
Shivakumar kept Finance, Intelligence, DPAR, and Cabinet Affairs for himself — the money, the intel, the bureaucracy. Priyank Kharge (the AICC president’s son) got Home minus Intelligence, plus IT/BT. Deputy CM G Parameshwara got Revenue. And Yathindra Siddaramaiah — the outgoing CM’s son — walked away with Urban Development.
Of the 13 ministers sworn in, the majority are from Siddaramaiah’s camp, not Shivakumar’s. Siddaramaiah himself collected a Congress Working Committee seat, refused the Rajya Sabha exit ticket, and kept the CM bungalow. A day before resigning, he quietly accepted the Backward Classes Commission survey report — a caste-census commitment his successor now has to live with.
The 2.5-year deal got honoured. The leverage stayed where it was. It’s the same playbook — the Gandhis picked Satheesan over the MLAs’ choice in Kerala, and they picked the terms of this handover too.
What Day 2 Was For
On Thursday, Shivakumar pulled IAS, IPS and Forest Service officers into a closed-door reset. Departments got 15 days to file action plans. He proposed two new ministries — Public Grievances and an NRI desk for Kannadigas abroad. He asked for data on Karnataka’s ₹8,000 crore CSR pool to redirect into primary education, healthcare, and infrastructure. He ordered taluk-level police squads. Across the border, Vijay signed three files on his first morning in Chennai — the South Indian governance speedrun is a thing.
It read like a man trying to govern past his own Cabinet.
The chair is his. The room is still Siddaramaiah’s. Two years to flip that — and his first-week decisions prove he knows exactly how short two years is.