FOR G. Janardhana Reddy, life has never looked this good.

The 42-year-old mining tycoon and BJP minister in the Karnataka state government has made untold wealth in recent years, exporting iron ore to China from the hot and dusty mineral-rich district of Bellary, 290 kilometres north of Bangalore.

On a recent morning, emerging from a meeting to engineer the defection of two opposition councilors to make the 35-member Bellary Municipal Corporation a complete BJP sweep, a buoyant and nattily dressed Reddy says: “Even I do not know how much money I have made in the last five years… I am currently building a Rs 20,000-crore steel plant in Cudappah (in neighbouring Andhra Pradesh).”

Within weeks of coming into power, Reddy drafted a mining policy for the state under which fresh mining leases would be given only to applicants who could “value-add”.

In other words, industrialists like him.

“My personal worth must be around Rs 1,500 crore,” Reddy estimates.

That’s more than the cumulative income of over 50 per cent of Bellary’s 15 lakh voters, and not a bad showing for a police constable’s son who entered business in 1989 by pooling Rs 35,000 with friends to set up a financial savings firm.

Today, Reddy's wealth has translated into two personal helicopters, numerous luxury cars, and vast political power as he cements his party’s reversed fortunes on election eve.

Till 1999, the backward Bellary district was undistinguished on India’s political map, and a Congress stronghold. The party had won every Lok Sabha election since Independence, and chose Bellary to deliver a win to party head Sonia Gandhi in her debut election against Sushma Swaraj.

Today, things could not be more different.

Three legislators from the district, including Reddy and his elder brother, are ministers in the state cabinet, and at the centre of the BJP’s power in the state.

Reddy’s elder brother won the party its first Parliamentary seat here in 2004, and Reddy promises a repeat by the BJP’s candidate and sister of a local MLA J. Shanti in the elections on April 23.