Kalyan8217;s thunderbolt

It was an outburst waiting to happen. For two weeks now, ever since he was shown the door, the former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Kalyan Singh, may have kept his peace but he had left no one in any doubt that he was in a particularly intractable mood. Thursday8217;s diatribe against Prime Minister Vajpayee removed every sliver of doubt that the man could be brought around with some skillful cajoling and blandishments. Certainly Vajpayee, who happened to be in Lucknow at that juncture, had not quite anticipated the thunderbolt. The Prime Minister had, in fact, gone out of his way to strike a conciliatory note and clarify that the party had yet to decide how best to utilise Kalyan Singh8217;s services and that there was no question of punishing him. The former chief minister, however, has preferred to be more direct. He sees himself as a wronged man more specifically, a man who has been wronged by Vajpayee himself. His words 8220;as long as he is the Prime Minister, I will not occupy any post in the party8221; smackof a bitterness that makes rapprochement practically impossible. Clearly, with those words, Kalyan Singh has burnt his bridges with the present BJP leadership in Delhi.

So where does this leave both Kalyan Singh and the BJP? Kalyan Singh is a man who knows his worth, he believes that the credit for having won Uttar Pradesh for the BJP should rightly go to him because he successfully married the OBC and Hindutva votebanks in a state where caste has come to be the most significant determinant in political aggrandisement. A certain political cunning; a raw, if sometimes misdirected, courage; and a certain impatience with political and ethical niceties have helped him seize a political moment to his advantage. So it was with Ayodhya, until the demolition of the mosque resulted in the demolition of the issue, so it was with the 8220;coup8221; in 1997, when Kalyan Singh thumbed his nose at Mayawati, split the opposition, and went on to rule UP for the next two years with an oversized cabinet. But this tendency to defy all odds could also prove his undoing. Given his political profile, it is the BJP which is his natural home. If he deserts the party, he is left with two choices. Eitherhe fashions a political party of his own, a la Vaghela, incorporating the more militant features of Hindutva politics as its defining characteristics, or join forces with Mulayam Singh Yadav. Either way, he will end up in political isolation. He was certainly not exaggerating when he told his followers the other day that they would have to be prepared to burn their houses to join him.

The BJP, too, stands to lose a great deal if Kalyan Singh were to depart. While this loss will be most manifest in the crucial state of UP, its effects could go far beyond the state, as the party8217;s Bihar state chief, Sushil Modi, underscored when he expressed his discomfiture over the sidelining of Kalyan Singh. This is because Kalyan Singh symbolises the BJP8217;s aspiration of both breaking out of its traditional Brahmin-upper caste brand of politics and of bringing various discrete communities within the Hindu fold under the overarching appeal of Hindutva. In short, no one wins from the present imbroglio 8212; neither the BJP nor the man who was once considered its shining hope.