JOIN USKalyan Singh, the man who showed BJP the 'Hindutva' way
Former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Kalyan Singh passed away on Saturday after a protracted illness.
Once considered to be a potential candidate for the post of prime minister, Kalyan Singh, one of the key figures behind the Ram Temple movement, is credited with the rise of the BJP in India’s largest and politically most crucial state of Uttar Pradesh.
It was Kalyan Singh, who blended Mandal with Kamandal, caste identity politics with Hindutva, into a potent political mix that resulted in BJP's expansion in the UP. When BJP came back to power in UP in 2017, they used the same formula of mixing the Mandal with Kamandal and is looking to use the same strategy in the upcoming assembly polls.
The defining moment in Kalyan Singh’s life was the fall of Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992. Just hours after mobs of kar sevaks demolished it, Singh quit as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh owning moral responsibility.
Not that he had any regrets over his “failure” to save the mosque which he had assured the Supreme Court would be protected.
Veteran journalist and Lucknow-based media analyst Rakesh Pandey says that Singh was then considered ‘equal’ to Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L.K.Advani in stature in the BJP.
"Such was his popularity after the Babri Masjid demolition that it took him 13 hours to cover a distance of 130 kilometres from Lucknow to Ayodhya when he visited the temple town after the demolition," Rakesh Pandey recalled.
Much before the rise of Narendra Modi in the national political space, it was Singh who was considered the “Hindu-Hriday Samrat” in the party ranks.
“Maybe it was destined that the structure would be demolished with me as chief minister,” Singh told a newspaper ahead of the 2020 “bhoomi pujan” for the Ram temple, now being built at the once disputed site in Ayodhya after a historic Supreme Court verdict.
“Had there been no demolition, probably the courts too would have ordered status quo,” he said then. And his last wish, he said, was to live till the temple comes up.
He was acquitted in the Babri Masjid demolition case by a special CBI court in Lucknow.
(With agency inputs)