When he saw the gallows being readied, Kalyan Singh betook himself to Ayodhya, there to hold communion, one-on-one, with Ram lalla, the child-god. (In the Congress, we don't trouble God; we bother George!) Ram lalla apparently told Kalyan Singh to sock it to Vajpayee. And so we have had the entertaining spectacle these last few weeks of Kalyan Singh not going gently into the night. On being replaced by one of the early rumoured suspects in the rumoured assassination of Deen Dayal Upadhyaya (although the se-ptuagenarian chief minister Ram Kishen Gupta is probably as innocent as Upad-hyaya's death was natural), Kalyan Singh launched himself on an entirely warranted denunciation of Vajpayee for abandoning the Ram Mandir agenda. Followed the expulsion of Kalyan Singh from the BJP. And Kalyan Singh's retaliatory retributive move to establish an alternative BJP in Uttar Pradesh. Capped by his transition from kamandal to mandal and into the waiting arms of hitherto sworn enemy Mulayam Singh Yadav.What does it allmean? At one level, all it means is that an opportunistic casteist politician has decided that if his term is up with the BJP, then the obvious place to find refuge is in the alternative form of exclusivism. That, however, is an option with limited scope. For once Mulayam gets over his thrill at the disintegration of the BJP's ranks, he will have to then cover his flanks from erosion by another backward classes leader. All that now distinguishes Mula-yam from Kalyan is that Mulayam links his backwards to the Muslims and Kalyan to the Hindus. But even as the Muslims are drifting in disillusion from the Samajwadi Party, so will few Hindus go with Kalyan. Sooner, much sooner than later, Kalyan and Mulayam will start competing for the same OBC vote, to the detriment of both. And the BJP. The big loser will be the BJP. For Kalyan Singh is to the BJP in UP what Sharad Pawar has been to the Congress in Maharashtra: incapable of winning many seats but well-positioned to wreck the prospects of the mother party.TheKalyan Singh rebellion has, within a month of Vajpayee's re-ascension to the gaddi, revived all the internecine quarrels within the Sangh Parivar which Jayal-alitha's tea party had, for a while, put on the backburner. The war between the RSS and the BJP, which broke out at this time last year, was postponed on account of the war with Pakistan and the subsequent war at the hustings. But as the euphoria over forestalling the installation of a foreign-born Prime Minister subsides, the Sangh Parivar will be back to wrestling with the key existential dile-mma which it has not resolved and cannot reso-lve: Power, yes, but po- wer for what? To remain the `B' team of the Congress party? Or to chart the route to Hindutva?Vajpayee was the only significant BJP leader not at Ayodhya on Black Sunday, December 6, 1992. Which is, of course, the key reason for his acceptability to the coalition he leads. As also for the grudge held against him by all those activists of the Hindu right whose sole interest in politics is toforge an alternative nationhood for India - Hindutva not Bharatiyata. These are the very ones for whom the priority is not sneaking into Race Course Road on any available back, but getting on with temple-building in Ayodhya as the preliminary to taking on the Idgah at the Krishna Janmabhoomi in Mathura and the Gyan Vapi Masjid adjacent to the Vishwanath Mandir at Varanasi. How has Vajpayee being thrice crowned advanced their ca-use? The rational majority is, quite rightly, delighted at the BJP's abandonment of the movement that brought it to where it has risen in the last decade. But those who fuelled that movement wi-sh to know what there is in it for them. What ma-kes Vajpayee acceptable to the rest of us his junking of everything he has espoused these last sixty years is precisely what makes him unacceptable to his own kind. The more Prime Mini-sterial he looks, the further does that take him from those who nurtu-red him. It took nine mo-nths last time, from Ma-rch to December 1998, for the RSS toturn on him. Unsurprisingly, th-ey did so in the aftermath of the drubbing the BJP received in the Assembly elections of November 1998. One does not know when or over which issue Vajpayee Mark-III will suffer his first setback. Kalyan Singh is determined to ma-ke it the day UP goes to the polls. He cannot but succeed. And that is when the Sa-ngh Parivar and the Vishwa Hindu Paris- had will gleefully revert to pointing out that the BJP under Vajpayee is not shaping up because it has lost its hard ideological core. And the agonising reappraisal will then begin. With incalculable consequences.The arithmetic of this Lok Sabha is su-ch that there is no threat to the government from the Opposition. There is also little to fear from the groupuscules that make up the rest of the NDA coalition. The danger is from within. Between those parivarists who are in politics for a purpose, however perverted that purpose, and those, like the Prime Minister, who are in it merely for the loaves of office, the tension can onlygrow. And there is no shortage of front-bench colleagues who delight in every embarrassment to Vajpayee.Trouble is brewing on all fronts, but most especially on Ayodhya. The trial co-urt will probably start framing charges at about the same time as Justice Liberhans submits his report. The prevarications of the past will then serve no longer. Vajpayee will have to decide what to do with his indicted colleagues. If he decides to do something, the wrath of the Parivar will burst on his head. And if he decides to do nothing, he will be setting himself up as target No.1 of the Opposition. To avoid this double pincer, Vajpayee will have to indulge at the very least in some token action against someone of significance whose only sin, in their eyes, is to have taken the vow in the name of Ram ki madir wahin banayenge. No, not a very happy millennium for Vajpayee: his enemies are climbing up the very ladder he kicked from under him once he got to the top. They don't like that; and they are a vengeful lot.KalyanSingh is not wrong, merely ah-ead of his time. The time will still come when he is hailed by those whose company he has kept these 45 years as the visionary who saw the future more clearly than those mesmerised by their ministerships. That will be the time for the stern reckoning.Aiyar is a Congress MP but these views are his own
