Stadium stampede: Karnataka Congress appears to be in panic mode after high command pulls up both CM, Dy. CM

Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and Deputy Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar with RCB members during the felicitation ceremony at the Vidhana Soudha in Bengaluru on June 4. | Photo Credit:

The ruling Congress in Karnataka appears to be in a panic mode after a stampede claimed the lives of 11 cricket fans outside Bengaluru’s M. Chinnaswamy Stadium on June 4, a day after the stupendous victory of Royal Challengers Bengaluru in the Indian Premier League that sent fans into raptures.

Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and Deputy Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar, who took a lead in the celebrations, have taken drastic actions, including suspending Bengaluru Police Commissioner B. Dayananda, and dismissing K. Govindaraju, MLC, from the post of political secretary to the Chief Minister. This was apparently after the Congress high command took the government to task for its “mishandling of the ground situation”.

Multiple sources in the Congress told The Hindu that the party’s central leaders spoke to Mr. Siddaramaiah and Mr. Shivakumar, who is also the KPCC president, and pulled up both leaders for allowing the celebrations without adhering to any norms.

Multiple leaders call

Embarrassed over the tragic turn of events during the RCB’s victory celebration, Congress central leaders, including AICC president Mallikarjun Kharge, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi, AICC general secretary in-charge of Karnataka Randeep Singh Surjewala, and AICC general (organisation) and MP K.C. Venugopal, have reportedly spoken to the two top leaders and pointedly questioned the “hurried celebrations”.

Apparently, the party high command has summoned the State’s two top leaders to New Delhi this week to explain the tragic events, sources said.

It was only after the central leaders’ nudge that the Siddaramaiah-led government appointed a one-man judicial commission headed by retired High Court judge John Michael D’Cunha to probe the incident and handed the case over to the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), even though a magisterial inquiry was already ordered on the same night, party sources said. They claimed that the presence of the Chief Minister’s grandson and Minister Zameer Ahmed Khan’s son on the Vidhana Soudha dais was another negative point.

Mr. Shivakumar rushing to the HAL airport to welcome the victorious RCB team, holding the RCB flag, and trying to take the credit through a photo-op, and deciding to continue the celebration at the stadium even when deaths were reported, have not gone down well with the Congress establishment in Delhi, it is learnt.

At Cabinet meeting

Sources said during the State Cabinet meeting held on June 5 several Ministers expressed their dismay and demanded drastic actions against officials responsible for the tragedy.

Yathindra Siddaramaiah, MLC and son of Mr. Siddaramaiah, also admitted that the government was under pressure to felicitate the team, but there were lapses in assessing the ground situation.

Amid the ongoing power tussle between the top two leaders, both Mr. Siddaramaiah and Mr. Shivakumar seem to be trying to save their skin by laying the blame on somebody else’s doorstep. In what appears to be a carefully crafted administrative move, Mr. Siddaramaiah has managed to hold on to officers loyal to him while turning the political heat on Mr. Shivakumar, who took the lead in the celebrations from the airport to the stadium, some party sources said.

The political implications of the stampede and reshuffle of IPS officers appear to be significant, as both Mr. Siddaramaiah and Mr. Shivakumar are constantly locked in a game of one-upmanship, with the latter nursing his chief ministerial ambition.

In the meanwhile, reports circulating regarding Chief Secretary Sahlini Rajneesh granting approval in the morning for the RCB celebration even before the final was played have emerged as another sore point.

Published - June 07, 2025 07:57 pm IST