Who is Jagadish Shettar?

New Delhi: Jagadish Shivappa Shettar was born on December 17, 1955, in Kerur village of Bagalkot district, Karnataka to SS Shettar and Basavanemma. His father, SS Shettar, was a senior activist of the Jana Sangh and was elected five times to the Hubli-Dharwad Municipal Corporation and became the first Jana Sangh mayor of Hubli-Dharwad. Jagdish Shettar's uncle Sadashiv Shettar was the first Jana Sangh leader in the South to get elected to the Karnataka Legislative Assembly from Hubli City in 1967.

Shettar's plunge into politics began with the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad. He also became an active member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

Shettar has BCom and LLB degrees and was a practising lawyer for 20 years at the Hubli Bar. He married Shilpa. The couple has two sons - Prashant and Sankalp.

In 1990, he became the president of the Hubli rural Unit of the BJP. Then in 1994, he became the Dharwad district unit chief of the party.

The same year, he was elected to the Assembly for the first time. Since then, he has been re-elected from the Hubli rural constituency for four successive terms. In 1996, Shettar became the BJP state secretary. In 1999, when he got elected for his second legislative term, he was chosen as the Leader of Opposition in the Assembly while SM Krishna was the chief minister of Karnataka.

In 2005, he was appointed as the BJP's state unit president. He went on to become the revenue minister in the JD(S)-BJP coalition government headed by HD Devegowda's son HD Kumaraswamy in 2006. In 2008, following the BJP's victory in the Assembly polls, Shettar became the Speaker. But he resigned just a year later and was inducted into the cabinet of BS Yeddyurappa as minister for rural development and Panchayat Raj.

In 2011, following the resignation of Yeddyurappa, Shettar emerged as a major contender for the post of the chief minister. However, the BJP Legislature Party elected DV Sadananda Gowda instead. But in 2012, things changed and Shettar was chosen by the BJP central leadership to replace Gowda.