ELECTIONS '98
COMMENTARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ARCHIVES

BJP in Uttar Pradesh is a house divided against itself

Top Bharatiya Janata Party leaders may be at pains to explain that their house was very much in order, even as fact remains that all was not well with the ruling party in the country's most populous state.

Chief Minister Kalyan Singh is busy fighting a battle not only with his ever-demanding allies, but has enough stock of problems from within. On one front, it is Kalyan Singh versus state BJP chief Raj Nath Singh; on the other it is Kalyan versus his senior-most cabinet colleague, Lalji Tandon, while another minister Kalraj Misra is playing smart by rolling on both sides.

Although Singh is equally responsible for the prevailing chaos within the state BJP, Kalraj Misra is regarded as the real villain of the piece, even as he has managed to put up a façade of a goody-goody activist. But the open war within is telling heavily on the governance of the state, where the prevailing chaos has been further confounded.

According to insiders, deep within Misra always dwelt a desire to raise to the coveted position of UP chief minister. And even when Singh became chief minister in his first stint in 1992, Misra had been a close contender. Since then he bore a natural grouse against the chief minister, which got further amplified with his second round in the coveted office. Despite Misra's mobilisation of Brahmins in his favour, he could not succeed in his lobbying against the CM, whose credentials as an OBC leader were enough to keep everybody else out of the race.

In fact, with the passage of time Kalyan Singh emerged stronger than before. Of course, he had an active and forthright party chief in Raj Nath Singh beside him, when he scored the most significant victory of his career -- staging the much-talked about political coup against his bete noire Mayawati, the Bahujan Samaj Party strongwoman. By forging a split in the BSP that was, until then a BJP ally in the Mayawati-led coalition in 1997, and simultaneously with a similar coup on the UP Congress, the new Kalyan-Raj Nath team-up had surely beaten both the BSP and the Congress in their own game.

The BJP duo emerged as the heroes, though much to the chagrin of Misra, who was only looking for an opportunity to forge a divide between the now even more formidable rivals.

Meanwhile, Raj Nath became more and more demanding while the CM was only too obliging to carry out most of his recommendations for transfers and postings of bureaucrats. However, as time passed and the list of demands remained unending, Singh had to bring in certain checks, which resulted in turning down of some of Raj Nath's requests. The tough BJP state chief, who had also managed to project himself as an undisputed Thakur leader in the state, found the dilly-dallying over his continued demands as offensive.

As if to tease him or to send a message that he was becoming overbearing, Kalyan propped up a one-time Raj Nath stooge and now member of the state legislative council Ajit Singh, to organise a Kshatriya Sammelan in Lucknow. The chief minister was the chief guest while Raj Nath was simply ignored.

While the state BJP chief was still brooding over this condescending behaviour on the part of Kalyan Singh, it was Misra who found an opportune moment to strike. Though he had managed to have his way in running his two heavy portfolios -- PWD and tourism -- where corruption and large-scale bungling were alleged to be the order of the day, he was finding the going tough in carrying out major deals that involved the approval of the chief minister, who was not too obliging. Besides, in any case the animosity towards Kalyan was still latent in him.

Realising that any renewed campaign by him against his long time adversary, may not cut much ice with the powers that be in New Delhi, Misra chose to prop up Raj Nath for the fresh salvo against the chief minister. An already pepped up Raj Nath, who had earned a name as the key player behind the BJP's masterstrokes that forged the party to power, did not need much to be provoked. All that he required was further pep talk that he could be a replacement CM. The gameplan worked and Raj Nath was ready to take on the chief minister.

Lalji Tandon, the minister for housing and urban development, who already had much in common with Misra against the chief minister, readily ganged up to join the Kalraj-Raj Nath "oust Kalyan" campaign. Tandon's main problem erupted largely on account of Kalyan Singh's decision to appoint a tough bureaucrat as Lucknow Development Authority vice chairman, whose demolition drive in the state capital (much against Tandon's wishes) got him the nick-named as 'Khairnar of Lucknow'.

Raj Nath managed to do what Kalraj and Tandon together could not -- taking a delegation of UP legislators to New Delhi to lodge a formal protest before the BJP high command against what they termed as Kalyan's "inaccessibility" to public representatives and his "autocratic" style of functioning. Tandon and Kalraj also used their close association with Vajpayee to apprise him of the alleged "undue interference" of a woman municipal corporator of Lucknow in the government's functioning "essentially on account of her proximity to the chief minister."

This heightened the misgivings, and brought Kalyan Singh at loggerheads with Raj Nath on one end and Kalraj-Tandon on the other. But once he got away with his explanations before the party's central leadership, Kalyan got down to settling scores with his neo-rivals. "I may have to abdicate my position, but I will not compromise with anyone on my principles", was his common refrain, both before the central leadership as well as to the media.

Apart from Kalyan's personal integrity, his strength also lies in his belonging to the OBC clan. Thus, no matter how much the strong Brahmin-Thakur lobby within the otherwise upper caste-dominated party would play up its anti-Kalyan tirade, the BJP leadership was in no position to pull out its most prominent OBC face from the governance of Uttar Pradesh.

Meanwhile, even as BJP president Kushabhau Thakre and RSS chief Rajju Bhaiya have done their bit by flying down to Lucknow to set the BJP house in order, relations continue to remain strained between the BJP's warring leaders in UP, where the party scored its all-time high tally of 59 out of UP's total share of 85 MPs in the last Lok Sabha elections.

Tell us what you think of this report