Ananth Kumar helped build BJP in Karnataka
bengaluru — Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister H.N. Ananth Kumar, who died on Monday, was widely regarded as an able political organiser who helped build the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Karnataka to expand the party’s reach in the country’s south.
Along with the party’s state unit president B.S. Yeddyurappa, Union Minister D.V. Sadananda Gowda and others, Kumar built the BJP across the southern state into a formidable alternative to the Congress and the Janata Dal.
Kumar’s organisational skills and proficiency in Kannada, Hindi, Marathi and English caught the attention of the party’s top leaders Atal Behari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani, who made him a BJP national general secretary at a young age.
“Kumar rose from the ranks to the national level in the BJP and the government, first as a student leader and later as an able party organiser,” BJP Karnataka spokesman S. Shantaram said.
He had another ability — winning friends across the political class. An urban face of the BJP, the 59-year-old Kumar was a six-time parliamentarian from the highprofile Bengaluru South Lok Sabha constituency since 1996.
He became a Union Minister at a young age (37) in the Vajpayee’s governments of 1998-99 and 1999-2004. Kumar again became a Union minister in May 2014 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave him the Chemicals and Fertilisers portfolio and, later, the Parliamentary Affairs portfolio.
In 2014, he defeated Congress star candidate and Infosys cofounder Nandan Nilekani, who entered the political arena after resigning as chairman of the state-run Unique Identification Authority of India. Kumar’s tryst with politics began in college days during the 1980s when he was elected as the state and national secretary of the Akhila Bharatiya Vidhya Parishad,
PM Narendra Modi
the student wing of the Sangh Parivar.
He was associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh as an organiser at Hubli-Dharwad in the state’s northwest region before joining the BJP in 1988.
Kumar was among those who helped the BJP to take power in Karnataka on its own in 2008. —
He was an able administrator, who handled many ministerial portfolios and was a great asset to the BJP organisation.