The Iron King Falls: The Conviction of Gali Janardhan Reddy

The story begins not in the courtroom of the Special CBI Judge in Hyderabad—where the gavel came down on May 6, 2025 with the thud of inevitability—but in the blistered, ochre-hued belly of Karnataka’s Bellary district, sometime in the early 2000s, when Gali Janardhan Reddy still fancied himself a man of destiny. The landscape here has always looked like something forged in the biblical third act of Genesis: rust-red hills bleeding iron, drought-bitten plains littered with bureaucratic indifference, and mineral seams fat enough to intoxicate even the most modest of ambitions.

Reddy was never modest. A village youth with a sideline in chit funds, he ascended swiftly through the dual engines of political patronage and geological good fortune. Alongside his brothers—who operated with the familial sync of a mining-age Medici clan—he built an empire on the back of the Obulapuram Mining Company (OMC), a concern that was the metaphorical Minotaur of southern India’s iron-ore racket.

The scam was audacious. The CBI alleged that Reddy’s OMC had systematically crossed state boundaries, encroached on forest land, and moved leases like one might reconfigure furniture. Export records were massaged. Trucks were double-counted. Iron ore was siphoned into the black-market bloodstream with such finesse that the Andhra Pradesh Mines Department was left blinking. It was not so much a mining operation as it was a conjuring trick.

By the time the Lokayukta’s hammer dropped in 2011—via a report that, among other things, detailed how Reddy’s “zero-risk system” provided cartelised protection to illegal mining—he had already ascended to the Karnataka Cabinet. He was not merely a businessman dabbling in politics, but a kind of crypto-sovereign figure, said to be capable of toppling governments, installing CMs, and bankrolling campaigns with the arrogance of a man who had discovered that democracy, like iron ore, was best mined under cover of night.

So why did it take this long? The case began with a CBI charge sheet in 2011, was supplemented three more times, and ultimately consumed over 3,300 documents and 219 witnesses, like some Kafkaesque termite mound of testimony. The verdict arrived not with a bang but with the slow-puncture hiss of a once-inflated myth deflating. Reddy, now 57, was sentenced to seven years of rigorous imprisonment. He was convicted alongside his brother-in-law and OMC MD B.V. Srinivas Reddy, ex-Andhra Pradesh Mines Director V.D. Rajagopal, and his longtime assistant Mehfuz Ali Khan. All of them were fined, nominally—₹10,000 each, a sum so farcically small in contrast to the ₹884 crore loss they allegedly engineered, it could be mistaken for satire.

Even while his case was wending its way through the legal underbrush, Reddy remained politically active. In 2022, he floated a new party—the Kalyana Rajya Pragati Paksha (KRPP) which he merged with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on March 25, 2024. He contested the 2023 Assembly elections and won the Gangavathi seat in Koppal, riding on a mixture of old loyalties, local patronage, and that peculiar south Indian loyalty to a man who was once “ours”, legal stains notwithstanding.

But the Representation of the People Act, 1951, is less sentimental. Section 8(3) states that any legislator convicted of an offence carrying a sentence of two years or more stands disqualified. Reddy, now a convicted criminal, faces automatic disqualification and a six-year ban post-incarceration from contesting elections. The MLA seat he won just a year ago will have to be vacated—pending appeals and procedural gymnastics, of course.

And yet, in a country where Lalu Yadav’s political reach remained intact from his prison cell and where MPs have campaigned via hologram, Reddy’s future is not entirely void of possibility. His political brand—equal parts Robin Hood and power broker—still finds traction in Kalyana Karnataka, where he built temples, funded weddings, and patronised local institutions with the flourish of a feudal overlord doling out progress.

What makes the Reddy case instructive is not just the scale of the corruption, but the intricate ecosystem that enabled it. His network allegedly included ministers, bureaucrats, forest officers, customs officials, and port authorities. The Obulapuram scam wasn’t an act of solitary villainy—it was a team sport. Shell companies such as GLA Trading International were allegedly deployed to launder profits. Transport clearances were fast-tracked. Checks were suspended. Forests were rendered invisible.

There is also a subplot with its own cast of survivors and casualties. For instance, Sabitha Indra Reddy, the former Andhra Minister for Mines and Geology, was among the original accused but was acquitted. One of the accused, Rao Linga Reddy, died during the trial, and another, Y Srilakshmi, was discharged from the case by the Telangana High Court in 2022.

For Bellary, the red dust has settled somewhat. Mining continues, albeit under stricter scrutiny. And so the Iron King falls—not into oblivion, but into that curious Indian purgatory where the line between convict and candidate, criminal and constituency hero, is drawn in sand, not stone.

Andhra PradeshGali Janardhan ReddyHyderabadObulapuram Mining CompanypoliticsSabitha Indra Reddy