A two-storey building in Bengaluru doubling up as a safe house saw a modest feast on the night of June 4. Its residents, some of the women who’ve lodged complaints with the police accusing Prajwal Revanna of rape, had followed the news that day with trepidation that turned into glee when the results were declared. Janata Dal (Secular) candidate Prajwal Revanna had lost the Hassan Lok Sabha seat to Shreyas Patel of Congress.
“I’m happy that he lost. I felt terrible in the morning when I saw that he was leading. Later, I saw Shreyas Patel was leading, and then he won. I was so happy that I went and bought sweets and chicken. I cooked chicken and all of us had dinner together,” said, Sunita* (name changed). Sunita is one of the women who has filed complaints against Prajwal Revanna. By all of us, Sunita meant her mother, Girija*, her two children; Mridula* and her son. Sunita, Girija, and Mridula have all accused Prajwal of sexual assault and are living in a safe house in Bengaluru under police protection.
Sunita is so elated that she’s put up a WhatsApp status of Shreyas Patel’s campaign pictures accompanied by upbeat film songs. “I’ve never done this before, but I couldn’t help it. I’m just so happy that he (Prajwal) lost.”
She said that her 10-year-old son, who only knows that they are in Bengaluru for something connected to Prajwal, was also happy. “He came and told me when he saw that Prajwal Revanna had lost. My children don’t know everything, but they know we are here because of Prajwal. We had all slept in the rain when Bhavani (Prajwal’s mother) had us thrown out of our house,” Sunita said.
Sunita’s mother, Girija, is a relative of Bhavani Revanna and was employed in their house for a few years. She allegedly convinced them to sell their house in Mysuru district and got a government site allotted to them in Holenarasipura town. Using the money from the sale of their house, they built a house on that site. However, Bhavani allegedly had them thrown out of the house and got someone else to occupy it, even though the land records are in Girija’s name. Activists in Hassan have urged the district administration to ensure that the illegal occupants of the house are evicted.
Prajwal Revanna, former Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda’s grandson, lost the Hassan Lok Sabha seat to Shreyas Patel of the Congress on June 4 with a margin of 42,649 votes.
Although the videos began circulating on April 22, it wasn’t until after voting on April 26 that the full scale of what had happened became known. The allegations of abuse are unlikely to have impacted voting, but the result has brought relief not just to the women whom Prajwal allegedly assaulted but to many people in Hassan district.
Read: Silenced by fear: Survivors reveal years of abuse in the Revanna household
By most accounts, videos of Prajwal’s alleged sexual abuse were leaked on April 22, just days before the election. The day before the election, Sunita and her mother Girija gave an interview to Power TV, a Kannada news channel alleging that he had sexually assaulted them. On April 26, Prajwal Revanna finished voting in Hassan in the morning and left for Bengaluru. Later that night, he fled the country.
Between April 28 and May 2, several complaints were filed against Prajwal Revanna and his father, HD Revanna, with the Special Investigation Team looking into the allegations.
Police later confirmed that there were around 3,000 videos of around 70 women, of whom four women have alleged that Prajwal Revanna raped them. The spread of videos in which the women’s faces are clearly visible has become impossible to contain. It has subjected the women to social ostracisation and caused them extreme distress.
Mamatha Shivu, a social worker in Hassan, welcomed Prajwal Revanna’s defeat. “When voting was held, all this (allegations against him) was not well-known. But people still voted him out. It shows that voters are discerning and they were fed up with his lack of proactiveness and unresponsiveness.”
Prajwal was widely perceived as an absentee MP and was inaccessible, even to journalists. He rarely attended meetings as an MP, and even when he did, it was ultimately his father and Holenarasipura MLA, HD Revanna, who called the shots.
Read: Power and fear: The turbulent story of Prajwal Revanna
Mamatha said that even if he had won, she and others in Hassan would have continued to fight until the women got justice. “But had he won, we would have been anxious because they would have retaliated against us. Now we don’t have that fear.” Still, she said that the fear would not completely go away until all the accused, including HD Revanna, who is out on bail, are imprisoned until the investigation is over.
'Need Shreyas to work for Hassan'
Vijay Kumar of the Madiga Dandora, said, “It’s like we won our freedom again. In the last 25 years, only he and his family have had freedom here. Only they could do as they pleased. It was the Republic of Hassan before. Now, it feels like the worst is behind us.”
He said that in the past five years as Hassan’s MP, Prajwal had done little. “Hassan has many problems — elephant attacks, coffee crisis, lack of support price for potatoes and coconut. But he didn’t do anything to solve any of them.”
The anger against Prajwal and his family also means that people have expectations of the Congress, Vijay says. “We’re not just happy that Prajwal has lost. We’re happy that Shreyas has won. He should understand that he’s been elected even though so many in (Prajwal’s) family are in elected office. Shreyas should make sure he works for us.”
Prajwal’s uncle, HD Kumaraswamy, his father, HD Revanna, his grandfather, HD Deve Gowda and his brother Suraj, hold elected office. Prajwal’s mother Bhavani, and his aunt Anita Kumaraswamy have held elected office in the past. His cousin Nikhil Kumaraswamy contested the Assembly elections in 2023 and Parliamentary elections in 2019 but lost both times.
Vijay Kumar cautioned that while people’s mandate had loosened the Deve Gowda family’s hold over the district, it was up to the Congress party to step up and work on the ground so that Revanna’s family did not regain their power.
Dharmesh, one of the organisers of the May 30 Hassan protest, for which over 5,000 turned up from across the state, said that the fear that Prajwal would be re-elected increased when the exit poll results came out. “We were dejected that such a man had been our MP for five years. There was always the fear that he would be re-elected and that feeling increased when we saw the exit polls. But voters have driven away our fears. He has lost and a good message has been sent. His defeat has given our struggle a moral strength.”
Watch: Thousands march through Hassan, protest Prajwal Revanna’s alleged crimes
However, Dharmesh said this was not a Congress victory as much as it was a “people’s victory.”
“The Congress did not work hard on the ground. Had they campaigned well, the victory margin would have been higher. Prajwal almost won. But people have decided (to vote him out). They defeated him, and we welcome it. Shreyas should work hard as a people’s representative.”
Decline in JD(S) vote share
Vijay Kumar and Dharmesh’s wariness and criticism of the Congress is not unfounded. Since 1991, the Congress has won the Hassan Lok Sabha seat only twice — once when Shreyas’ grandfather, G Puttaswamy Gowda, defeated Deve Gowda in 1999 and the just concluded election in which Shreyas defeated Prajwal. The party’s vote share too, is not something it can brag about.
In the past four Lok Sabha elections, the Congress and BJP have been vying for a foothold in Hassan district, but Deve Gowda managed to keep them at bay. While he won the 2004 and 2009 elections easily with around 50% of the vote (BJP did not contest in 2004), the last decade has been slightly different.
In 2014, the Congress got 35% of the vote share for the Hassan seat and the BJP 14%, bringing down Gowda’s vote share to 44%. In 2019, when the Congress and JD(S) were in alliance, the BJP pulled off a stunning 41% vote share, even though Prajwal held on to the seat comfortably with 52% of the vote share.