A dry-country taluk town of twenty-one thousand people, whose railway station is in another state and whose forest is the wrong forest for the Deccan — and which produced a Chief Minister of Karnataka whose sacking, announced on an airport tarmac, changed the shape of the state’s politics for a generation.
Chincholi sits at 462 m on the eastern lip of Kalaburagi district, roughly 6 sq km of town in a taluk that runs to the Telangana line. The 2011 census counted 20,897 people. It borders Sedam and Chittapur inside its own district, Humnabad in Bidar, and Zahirabad and Tandur across the state boundary — and that last fact is the practical one, because the nearest railway station is Tandur, about 30 km away in Telangana, ahead of Sedam at 42 km and Kalaburagi Junction at 77. A town whose closest train is in a neighbouring state tells you most of what you need to know about where it sits.
The town is a small part of the taluk, and the two get conflated. Chincholi town held 20,897 people at the 2011 census; Chincholi taluk held 254,287 across 124 villages, over about 1,550 sq km. So the great majority of the people this town serves do not live in it — they live in those villages, and the town is their market, their bus stand and their taluk office. That is the right way to picture the place: not a destination with a hinterland, but a hinterland with a service town in the middle of it.
The farming is jowar and pulses on black cotton soil, which is what this country grows when the rain is unreliable, and the rain here is unreliable. Water is the recurring local argument rather than a background condition — the two reservoirs, Chandrampalli on the Mullamari and the Nagaral reservoir at the Mullamari lower dam, exist because of it, and summer shortages across the taluk’s villages are a normal feature of the year rather than an emergency. A visitor notices none of this in October and all of it in May.
The land is dry. This is plateau, not ghat: hot from March, properly punishing by May, and dependent on the south-west monsoon that arrives in June and is thinner here than almost anywhere else in Karnataka. The two reservoirs the taluk is known for — Chandrampalli on the Mullamari, a tributary of the Bhima, and the Nagaral reservoir at the Mullamari lower dam — were built to hold what little there is. So the striking thing about Chincholi taluk is not that it is dry but that a substantial deciduous forest survives on it, carrying sandalwood and red sanders and a documented list of medicinal plants, which is what led Karnataka to notify 134.88 sq km of it in 2011 as the state’s twenty-first wildlife sanctuary and the first dry-land sanctuary in South India. The sanctuary is described in the literature as the one area in the old Hyderabad-Karnataka region carrying features of a Western Ghats forest. Its own page tells that story properly, including the 2023 camera-trap rediscovery of the dhole; the town’s job is to be the last place with a hospital, a bus stand, fuel and drinking water before you go in.
The town’s own history is the history of the Deccan’s awkward middle. From 1724 until 1948 this was not part of any Karnataka: it belonged to the Nizam’s Hyderabad State, and the traces the region carries are Satavahana, Rashtrakuta, Kalyani Chalukya, Bahmani and then Asaf Jahi. Hyderabad State was integrated into India in September 1948, and in 1956 the States Reorganisation moved Kalaburagi district into the new Mysore State — two talukas going instead to Andhra Pradesh. That is three sovereignties inside thirty-two years for a town that never moved, and it is the reason the region’s development lag has been treated as a constitutional question rather than merely a budgetary one.
Which brings you to the politics, and to the reason a town this size is worth a paragraph in the history of Karnataka. Veerendra Patil was born in Chincholi on 28 February 1924, when it was still Hyderabad State. He sat in the Hyderabad Legislative Assembly from 1952, was returned from the Chincholi seat in 1957 and 1962, and became Chief Minister of Karnataka twice — from 29 May 1968 to 18 March 1971, and again from 30 November 1989 to 10 October 1990. He was a Lingayat of the Banajiga sub-sect, and in the 1989 election he led the Congress to 178 of the state’s 224 assembly seats, which is among the largest majorities any party has held in Karnataka.
What happened next is the part people still argue about. In October 1990, with communal violence breaking out in parts of the state and Patil recovering from a stroke, the Congress president Rajiv Gandhi announced on the tarmac at Bengaluru’s HAL airport — to reporters who had just raised the Chief Minister’s health with him — that Patil was being replaced. He was: President’s Rule followed, and S. Bangarappa was sworn in. The reading offered by Karnataka’s own press is that the manner of it, more than the fact of it, turned the Lingayat community against the Congress and opened the ground the BJP later occupied in the state. That is an interpretation rather than a document, and we flag it as one; but it is the interpretation carried by the Deccan Herald and by most subsequent accounts, and the electoral record after 1990 is not inconsistent with it. Patil died on 14 March 1997.
Chincholi could not elect another Veerendra Patil today, for a reason worth stating plainly: the constituency, formed in 1951, is now reserved for the Scheduled Castes, which it was not when he contested it as a Lingayat in 1989. It sends its member to the Bidar Lok Sabha constituency and had 203,600 electors at the 2023 state election — an election it decided by 858 votes. Dr Avinash Umesh Jadhav of the BJP took 69,963 votes, or 46.66%; Subhash V. Rathod of the Congress took 69,105, or 46.09%; the margin was 0.57% on a turnout of 73.72%. For a seat whose most famous member commanded 178 of 224, that is a striking amount of distance travelled.
The second political name attached to the town needs a correction, because the Kannada Wikipedia article lists him among Chincholi’s notable people in a way that reads as though he were born here. Vaijnath Patil was not: he was born on 29 July 1938 at Hakyala in Aurad taluk, Bidar district, and settled in Chincholi taluk later. He represented Chincholi in the assembly from 1994 to 1999 and again from 2004 to 2008, sat in the Legislative Council from 1984 to 1990, and held Horticulture under Ramakrishna Hegde and Urban Development under H. D. Deve Gowda. His lasting work was outside office: as president of the Hyderabad Karnataka Horata Samithi he led the movement, over more than a decade, for the special status that became Article 371(J) of the Constitution in 2013 — reservations in education and employment for the region and a Kalyana Karnataka Region Development Board covering Bidar, Ballari, Kalaburagi, Raichur, Koppal and Yadgir. One small caution on the published record: the two Deccan Herald reports of his death give his age as 81 and as 82, so we have not printed a figure.
So the honest summary of Chincholi is this. It is not a sightseeing town and nothing in it is a monument. It is the service town for a forest that has no business being as good as it is, and it is a place whose twentieth-century politics reached a long way past its size. Both of those are reasons to know what you are looking at while you are here, and neither is a reason to stay longer than the sanctuary needs.
