Bengaluru: BS Yeddyurappa, the 75-year-old veteran politician from Karnataka, who took oath as chief minister for the third time on Thursday, has been a survivor in a career spanning over five decades.
The 75-old Lingayat leader, who is credited of laying the foundation of BJP in this southern state, has been controversy's favourite child. During his rise from an ordinary RSS worker to the highest echelons of power, BSY, as Yeddyurappa is popularly known, courted several controversies and faced a murky legal battle to come out clean in the country's top court.
BS Yeddyurappa, who started as a clerk and, today, took oath as the chief minister for the third time, has navigated the choppy waters of politics with the consummate ease of a seasoned oarsman, defying tidal waves of adversity.
A hard-boiled RSS Swayamsevak, 75-year-old Bookanakere Siddalingappa Yeddyurappa, joined the right-wing Hindu outfit when he was barely 15, and cut his political teeth in the Jana Sangh, the BJP's forerunner, in his home-town Shikaripura in Shivamogga district.
He became the Jana Sangh's Shikaripura taluka chief in the early 1970s.
BSY, who currently represents Shivamogga in the Lok Sabha, was first elected to the Legislative Assembly from Shikaripura in 1983 and went on to win it five more times.
The Lingayat strongman is known to have championed the cause of farmers, something which was repeatedly referred to by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his election speeches.
A Bachelor of Arts, Yeddurappa, who was jailed during Emergency, worked as a clerk in the Social Welfare Department before taking up a similar job at a rice mill in his native Shikaripura.
BSY later set up his own hardware shop in Shivamogga.
Yeddyurappa may have landed in the hot seat in 2004 itself when the BJP emerged as the single largest party, but the Congress and JD(S) led by former prime minister HD Deve Gowda cobbled together an alliance, and a government was formed under Dharam Singh.
Known for his political sagacity, Yeddyurappa joined hands with HD Kumaraswamy, Deve Gowda's son, in 2006 and brought down the Dharam Singh government after the chief minister was indicted by Lokayukta in an alleged mining scam.
Under an arrangement with JDS for sharing the chief minister's post on a rotational basis, Kumaraswamy became the chief minister and Yeddyurappa his deputy. However, the coalition government collapsed as the JD (S) reneged on the power-sharing deal after 20 months, paving the way for elections.
In the 2008 polls, the Lingayat heavyweight led the party to victory, and the first BJP government in the south was formed under him.
Yeddyurappa was soon mired in controversies related to the alleged abuse of office to favour his sons in allotment of land in Bengaluru. His subsequent indictment by Lokayukta in an illegal mining scam forced him to resign on July 31, 2011.
On October 15 that year, he surrendered before the Lokayukta court after it issued a warrant against him in connection with alleged land scams. He was then put in jail for a week, dealing a body blow to the BJP's claim of being a party with a difference.
Sulking after having been made to quit, Yeddyurappa broke his decades-long association with the saffron party and floated a new political outfit the ''Karnataka Janata Paksha''.
However, ploughing a lonely furrow, he failed to make the KJP a force to reckon with in Karnataka politics but wrecked the BJP's chances of retaining power in the 2013 polls, winning six seats and polling about 10 percent of the total votes polled.
As Yeddyurappa faced an uncertain future and the BJP looked for a leader with a formidable reputation to lead its campaign ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the two came together once again.
On January 9, 2014, Yeddyurappa merged his KJP with the BJP. In the Lok Sabha elections that followed, the BJP won 19 of the state's 28 seats, a remarkable turnaround for the party which had secured a measly 19.9 percent votes in the Assembly polls just a year ago leading to the fall of its first government.
Notwithstanding the taint of corruption, Yeddyurappa's status and clout grew in the BJP.
On October 26, 2016, he got a huge relief when a special CBI court acquitted him, his two sons and son-in-law in a Rs 40-crore illegal mining case, which had cost him the chief minister's post in 2011.
In January 2016, the Karnataka High Court quashed all 15 FIRs against Yeddyurappa lodged by the Lokayukta police under the Prevention of Corruption Act.
In April that year, he was appointed the state BJP chief for the fourth time. The Lingayat leader, however, continued to be dogged by controversies, with the anti-corruption bureau launching proceedings against him in an alleged illegal land de-notification case.
He petitioned the high court, which stayed the ACB proceedings against him. The taint of alleged corruption notwithstanding, the BJP declared him its chief ministerial candidate, ignoring the taunts by the Congress.
(With PTI inputs)
