Sacked on November 11, 1999, the former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh,
Kalyan Singh, has been another Mr. Dependable for the Bhartiya
Janata Party (BJP). But his arrogant ways with his partymen and his
attempts to dole out favours to his loyalists, specially a lady corporator
of Lucknow Kusum Rai, proved his undoing. As the BJP chief minister for
26 months he faced unprecedented revolt from within the party and as a
result was removed from the chief minister's position.
Hailed by his party as the hero of 1992 demolition of the Babari
mosque and denounced for the same reason by the rest of the political forces
in the country, Kalyan Singh, heckled by the internal bickerings, presided
over the party's debacle in 1999 Lok Sabha elections when it won only 29
seats against 57 of the total 85 parliamentary seats in 1998 elections.
The party had won 52 seats in the 1996 elections
Kalyan Singh now faces a huge question mark in his political career. One of the biggest crowd pullers in the BJP still, Kalyan Singh, humiliated by his ouster, has refused to accept a union ministerial berth, a national position in the party and has chosen to remain a party worker. There have been speculations about him and his one time arch rival Mulayam Singh Yadav shaking hands to form a backward plateform. But Yadav's Samajvadi Party (SP), which won 26 seats in 1999, will have much to loose in terms of its minority votes if this shakehand comes through. Kalyan Singh also failed to settle a score or two with Bahujan Samaj Party's (BSP) Mayawati, who ditched him and withdrew from an alliance with the BJP, after her six-month stint in power, in September 1997. The BSP improved its tally from 4 seats in 1998 to 14 in 1999 mostly at BJP's cost.
With Kalyan Singh uprooted unceremoniously, there a signs that he will like to rake up the Rama Janm Bhumi temple issue, which brought him to such a prominent position, once again. His visit to Ayodhya on November 9, 1999 and his scathing attacks against Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpai there came as the first indications of Kalyan Singh's new political gameplan. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), one of the stronger fundamentalist faces of the RSS brotherhood more popularly known as the Sangh Parivar, had already been actively preparing for the new temple of Lord Rama at the disputed site in Ayodhya. The organisation has been running a workshop for the last 5 years where various structures for the new temple are being chiselled by trained artisans from Rajasthan. With a BJP government both at the Centre and in U.P., the hyper-active workshop has gained special signficance. Kalyan Singh announced in Ayodhya that the issue can either be sorted through a dialogue or by making a law. It cannot be sorted out through a court case, he said, as he reiterated his commitment for building the new Rama temple. Sulking Kalyan Singh, surely plans to give the BJP and its new UP chief minister Ram Prakash Gupta a tough time in the near future.