Editorial, The Statesman, 15 Dec., 1999

... (Kalyan Singh's) rhetoric has undergone a drastic transformation: it is now radically mandalised. He talks of social engineering, social justice for backwards, rails against the Brahmin prime minister and his erstwhile upper caste colleagues, is reinventing himself as a caste leader, either in the hope of weaning away the backwards or forging some kind of a broad OBC alliance with Mulayam Singh Yadav ... With the Hindutva plank an alliance with Mulayam was impossible, so out goes the plank. Although insuperable difficulties may be foreseen,  firstly he is charged for his role in the demolition of the Babari Masjid, and secondly, from his own chief ministerial ambitions that the' SP supremo is unlikely to tolerate ...

The BJP ... cannot pretend ... that caste arithmetic is not pertinent to performance.