Behind the ‘Big Boss’ house lock: a case of power without restraint

 

What happened at the Bigg Boss Kannada house in Bidadi has now taken an even darker turn. A few days after ordering the abrupt sealing of the studio complex in the dead of night, Deputy Chief Minister D. K. Shivakumar himself quietly directed the Ramanagara Deputy Commissioner to remove the lock and reopen the premises. Within hours, the participants were back inside, cameras rolling again as though nothing had happened. The sequence of lock and unlock — both done in stealth, both without due process — lays bare a shocking truth: there is no rule of law in how this government acts, only the whims of one powerful man.

The original shutdown, carried out under the banner of the Karnataka State Pollution Control Board (KSPCB), was never about the environment. It was an exercise in political coercion, not regulation. The same board that routinely ignores factory pollution and illegal quarrying suddenly discovered its conscience when it came to a television studio. And now, with equal suddenness, that “conscience” has vanished. The reopening exposes the farce: D. K. Shivakumar engineered both the lock and the key.

This incident is not an isolated error but a pattern of behaviour. Only weeks earlier, the Deputy Chief Minister had thundered that he knew how to “tighten the nuts and screws” on the entertainment industry — a threat aimed at producers and channels that refused to yield to his political overtures. The Big Boss episode appears to be the live demonstration of that warning. Acting in haste and repenting at leisure has become his trademark. But such impulsive governance, when it disrupts livelihoods and undermines legal institutions, ceases to be a personal quirk — it becomes a public menace.

The larger concern is not the fate of one television show but the erosion of institutional integrity. When a minister can seal and unseal a private establishment at will, without legal sanction or procedural transparency, it signals the collapse of administrative checks and balances. The KSPCB has been reduced from a statutory body to a political instrument, its credibility compromised beyond repair.

Hundreds of technicians and workers lost wages and workdays because of this arbitrary act. D. K. Shivakumar owes them an apology. A leader who exercises power without responsibility demeans both his office and his party. The Congress high command must publicly reprimand its state president for this gross misuse of authority.

The Big Boss house may have reopened, but the episode has left behind a lingering question: if this is how power is exercised in full public view, what happens behind closed doors? Governance by impulse is governance by arrogance — and Karnataka deserves far better than that.