For the BJP, (Kalyan Singh) was many, things rolled into one - the hero of Ayodhya, who watched a Masjid crumble so that the promised temple could emerge from its ruins; the social engineer who put together a winning caste coalition by welding his own popular backward caste base with his party's traditional upper caste support; the Machiavellian mastermind that produced many astonishing feats, including a legislative majority that came from nowhere, and a government that was born almost entirely of defections.
Kalyan derives his significance from being able to combine Mandir and Mandal, two concepts thought to be diametrically opposite. He was linked to Mandir, which catapulted the BJP to political centrestage, and to Mandal, which carried the party's appeal, confined for decades only to the upper castes, to sections previously opposed to the BJP:
Formidable Force: Ironically, the alienation of Kalyan Singh appears to have happened because the BJP could never reconcile the two. When the BJP started the Mandir movement, it was as a counter to Mandal : If mandalisation divided the Hindus and pushed them permanently into upper and backward slots, Mandir achieved the opposite by cementing the differences and placing a single objective before the community. The strategy suited Kalyan, though he didn't see a conflict between the two; in fact, both were equally his passions. If Mandir was his goal, Mandal was his belief, which explains why even as he spoke of building a grand Ram temple at Ayodhya, he also gradually mandalised the party by recruiting more and more OBCs to important positions and establishing himself at the head of an OBC coalition, the core of which constituted his own community, the Lodh Rajputs.
It is this coming together of various castes - the BJP's original constituency of Brahmins and Banias combining with substantial sections of other backward castes – which gave the BJP a base vote in excess of 30 per cent and made it a formidable force in any election. By itself, no party could match the BJP. The Congress was reduced to bankruptcy following the desertion of the Dalits and Muslims. Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati remained fiercely committed to their own communities which meant that their parties couldn't grow beyond a point. And in a situation where no two parties would unite against the BJP - barring two exceptions - the latter went virtually unchallenged.
Upper Caste Target: Kalyan was a key ingredient in this success formula, for only he could hold the backward castes together ... As long as Hindutva was the focus, (BJP) papered over the upper caste-backward caste divide in the party ... But without Hindutva, he became the OBC chief minister in a party controlled by the entrenched classes. It was inevitable in this caste war that Kalyan should become a target of the upper caste leadership. He, in turn, became the spurned Lodh Rajput, conscious as much of the backwardness of his community as of his own inferior station in the party. Kalyan was never a great administrator, but in his second term he deliberately allowed the state administration to collapse. And in the 1999 elections, he deliberately brought losses to the BJP by allowing the backwards to consolidate in favour of the rival Samajwadi Party.
Had the BJP genuinely accepted the backward castes, instead of seeing their co-option merely as a strategy to win elections, Kalyan might have not become the problem he has today ...(Source: The Times of India, 12 November, 1999)
