Chief Minister of Karnataka

The Chief Minister of Karnataka is the head of government of the Indian state of Karnataka. As per the Constitution of India, the governor is the state's de jure head, while the de facto executive authority rests with the chief minister. Following elections to the Karnataka Legislative Assembly, the state's governor usually invites the political party (or a coalition of political parties) with a majority of assembly seats to form the government in the state. The governor appoints the chief minister, whose council of ministers is collectively responsible to the assembly. Given that he/she has the confidence of the assembly, the chief minister's term is for five years, renewable, and is subject to no term limits. Usually, the chief minister also serves as leader of the house in the legislative assembly.

The office traces its lineage to the dewan of Mysuru, the chief minister of the princely Kingdom of Mysore under the British Raj. After Indian independence in 1947, this became the office of prime minister of Mysuru State, which was in turn redesignated chief minister when Mysuru became a constituent state of the newly declared Republic of India in 1950. The state, expanded along linguistic lines in 1956, was renamed Karnataka in 1973, and the office has been styled Chief Minister of Karnataka ever since. Since 1947, twenty-one people have held the position, an overwhelming majority of them from the Indian National Congress (INC), which has supplied twelve of the twenty-one officeholders and accounted for the bulk of the office's cumulative tenure. INC's dominance was broken only intermittently: by Ramakrishna Hegde of the Janata Party in 1983, the first chief minister unaffiliated with Congress or its breakaway factions; by two terms of Janata Dal-descended governments in the 1990s and 2000s, including the Janata Dal (Secular) premierships of Deve Gowda and HD Kumaraswamy; and, from 2007 onward, by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose B. S. Yediyurappa became Karnataka's first BJP chief minister and, across four separate terms, the only person to hold the office that many times.

Tenures have varied widely in length and stability. Siddaramaiah holds the record for the longest single stint, at eight years and eighteen days across two terms, while Veerendra Patil had the longest gap between his two periods in office, at over eighteen years. The state has also seen recurring interruptions: six spells of President's rule, most recently from November 2007 to May 2008, during which the office fell vacant and administration passed to the governor. Two father–son pairs have held the post — Deve Gowda and Kumaraswamy of the JD(S), and S. R. Bommai and his son Basavaraj Bommai of the BJP — and two former chief ministers went on to higher national office: B. D. Jatti, chief minister from 1958 to 1962, later became India's fifth Vice President in 1974, while Deve Gowda became the eleventh Prime Minister in 1996. D. K. Shivakumar became the twenty-first and incumbent chief minister on 3 June 2026, succeeding Siddaramaiah.