Prajwal Revanna | Rise and fall
The Hindu
Prajwal Revanna's political rise and fall, marred by sexual assault allegations, pen drive scandal, and family rifts.
From being the sole MP from Janata Dal (Secular) in the Lok Sabha in 2019 to being suspended by the party in 2024 and facing investigation by a Special Investigation Team (SIT) for alleged sexual assault on women, Prajwal Revanna’s fall has been quick and dramatic. Believed to be in Germany, the Hassan MP, grandson of former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda, skipped the summons from the SIT, which has now got a lookout circular issued at all entry points to the country. He is charged with rape.
Prajwal’s 2024 election campaign from Hassan has been marred by the now infamous ‘pen drives’ that has changed the course of election narrative in Karnataka and has put his party, founded by his grandfather, as well as the alliance partner BJP, in a quandary. Prajwal, as the NDA candidate, is facing the Congress’ Shreyas Patel, the grandson of former legislator Puttaswamy Gowda, who fought Mr. Deve Gowda in many election battles.
At the centre of the ‘biggest sex scandal’ so far that has rocked the State, he faces accusation of sexual assault on women from various social and economic background, and recording the act on his mobile phones, in some cases despite opposition by his victims.
The pen drive floating around Hassan has 2,976 files, the bulk of which are screenshots of chats, video calls with several women and nearly 100 videos. It also includes two videos — one of a housemaid, who has now allegedly been kidnapped at the behest of Prajwal’s father, and another video of a farm labourer being raped allegedly by the MP. Police are estimating the number of women victimised by the incumbent MP to be over 90. These pen drives, released four days before the elections on April 26, containing explicit videos and without masking the identity of the victims, appeared mysteriously in public places.
The 2019 parliamentary elections saw the rise of Prajwal in Hassan’s political landscape in Karnataka. First member of the third generation in the Gowda clan to taste election success, the 28-year old was among the young Parliamentarians in the country in 2019. The rest of the family, however, was not as lucky. Mr. Deve Gowda, who had vacated his home turf Hassan to his grandson and moved to neighbouring Tumakuru, tasted defeat in his last electoral battle while another grandson Nikhil Kumaraswamy lost from Mandya, the hotbed of Vokkaliga politics in the Old Mysore region.
Though publicly Prajwal was seen as “an arrogant young man with a feudal mindset”, long-time observers of the Gowda family say his public actions were mostly aimed at cementing his place politically in the district and challenging the power of his uncle and former Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy within the party structure. Though there were murmurs in Hassan about sex tapes after he sought injunction from the court in June 2023, to prevent airing or publishing any explicit content, the magnitude of the scandal has sent shock waves among the public, and apparently within the family and party too.
His father H.D. Revanna, a former Minister and elder brother of Mr. Kumaraswamy, has run the party affairs in Hassan with an iron grip. Prajwal and his elder brother Sooraj Revanna, an MLC, have been part of the electioneering process of their father as well as their mother Bhavani Revanna, a former member of Hassan Zilla Panchayat. He was a toddler when his grandfather became the PM and his father became a Cabinet Minister, and a teenager when his uncle became the Chief Minister of Karnataka in 2006.
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