Sweet meetings

Kalyan Singh fed Atal Bihari Vajpayee a laddoo and wished him a happy birthday eve. And the prime minister thanked him for his good wishes. ...

Kalyan Singh fed Atal Bihari Vajpayee a laddoo and wished him a happy birthday eve. And the prime minister thanked him for his good wishes. And of course, that8217;s not the end of the story. In fact, the Lucknow sweetsomethings have ignited a giddy fever of gossip and speculation that isn8217;t likely to be subdued by any inconvenient reality checks. In this season of festivity, when hard news seems to be taking a well deserved break, only the hopelessly pedantic would pass up the opportunity to read a birthday wish as something more. That laddoo, well, it could have been an olive branch, a truce, a pact, a poll strategy in Uttar Pradesh.

But seriously. The greetings exchanged by the two leaders at Lucknow this week could well be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, a second time. Singh and Vajpayee share a recent history of rancour. There was that time, not so long ago, when Singh, Hindu Mahanayak and chief minister of UP who presided over the Babri demolition, was first removed from chief ministership and then expelled from the party that till just the day before had convinced him of his own indispensability. It was a bitter parting and though the BJP subsequently dipped to number three in the state and Singh himself was reduced to playing second fiddle to Mulayam Singh, it seemed the estrangement would hold. Then, politics intervened. The BJP knows UP is the first stop on the road back to Delhi. It also knows that all its famed micro-management of constituencies will not help in this most complex of states if it cannot get the grand strategy right again. There was a time when, Kalyan Singh as mascot, it could woo the backward castes into its fold in large enough numbers to count. So, just begun on Mission 2004, there are some hard political reasons why the BJP may want the prodigal back again.

But what UP really-really wants is the BSP. No, not Mayawati and her band, but bijli-sadak-pani. UP waits for good governance to become good politics as it seems to have become in the states that just went to the polls. In the end, whether or not Kalyan Singh makes up with Vajpayee8217;s BJP again in time for General Elections 2004, the people of the state are waiting for a different day.