Two-man army

BJP president Rajnath Singh and other senior party leaders coming out of Hazaratganj Kotwali in Lucknow after presenting themselves in connection with the FIR filed over the controversial compact disk the party released during the election campaign and has since withdrawn.-SUBIR ROY

Veterans Rajnath Singh and Kalyan Singh do it for the BJP with a mix of opposition politics and Hindutva.

IT is back to the 1980s in more ways than one for Rajnath Singh and Kalyan Singh, the two star campaigners of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections. In that period both emerged as significant leaders of the BJP in the State by actively pursuing opposition-party politics. The personalities and parties they took on at that time included Chief Ministers like Narayan Dutt Tiwari and Bir Bahadur Singh of the Congress and Mulayam Singh Yadav of the then not-so-divided Janata Dal.

A lot has changed in the lives of the two leaders since then. Both became Chief Ministers of Uttar Pradesh as well as Ministers in the Union government in the past one and a half decades. Kalyan Singh went out of the party and returned, while Rajnath Singh is now the BJP's national president. But in this round of Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh the two leaders are replicating their 1980s' advocacy of opposition politics.

Of course, their list of political opponents is different this time. The targets in the Congress are Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, party president Sonia Gandhi and star campaigner Rahul Gandhi. One-time ally and leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Mayawati, is also on the list now. Mulayam Singh Yadav is the only old name on the list and is a constant opponent, as the incumbent Chief Minister and as the leader of the Samajwadi Party (S.P.).

The two senior leaders have also adopted their 1980s' style and manner of campaigning, the hallmark of which was aggression. Both leaders combine criticism of the ruling parties, the S.P. in the State and the Congress at the Centre, with the advocacy of Hindutva as a panacea for all socio-economic and political problems. The controversial compact disk (CD) that the party is trying to disown before the Election Commission is very much a part of this new pursuit of the Hindutva agenda.

Watching Rajnath Singh perform at a campaign rally at Faridpur in Bareilly district, tearing into political adversaries and asserting that Hindutva-oriented development of the country was the only alternative, senior local BJP activist Nripendra Kumar Singh was exhilarated. "This is vintage Rajnath Singh," he exclaimed. According to the committed Sangh Parivar worker, Rajnath Singh has got back his campaign verve and vigour in this round of elections. "In all the Assembly and Lok Sabha elections since 1996, we had the burden of incumbency one way or the other. We were in power at the Centre or in the State or both at the Centre and in the State. After more than a decade we are now a full-fledged opposition party with the potential to embark on an all-out offensive. And, obviously, our leaders are enjoying it," Nripendra Kumar said.

It was indeed a classic, Hindutva-oriented opposition performance from Rajnath Singh. While he did not spare a single political opponent in his approximately hour-long speech, his principal target was Mulayam Singh Yadav and his party. Beginning with the issue of law and order, the most vulnerable facet of the S.P. government, Rajnath Singh went on to highlight the deficiency in power supply and the troubles that farmers face in getting a proper price for their produce. "The S.P. has roped in one of the greatest artists of Uttar Pradesh to propagate that crime is low in the State. By doing so they have brought down the prestige of not only the artist but all the people in the State. Let me tell you that in no other State has the law and order system collapsed as completely as it has in Uttar Pradesh." On the power situation, Rajnath Singh went on to add that "though the dead power lines of the State do not give an electric shock, the exorbitant power bills do give a totally different kind of shock to the people".

The second most important target is the Congress, which is held responsible for the spiralling prices and inflation. "These were the people who threw out our welfare government led by the venerable Atal Bihari Vajpayee, promising to protect the aam aadmi's interests."

The attack on the BSP is centred on the party's efforts to wean away a section of the BJP's core support base of upper castes to its fold. "A few years ago Mayawati was saying that her party was built up to champion the cause of Dalits and other marginalised sections that form Bahujan Samaj [the majority of the population]. Now the same leader says her party is for sarva Samaj [for all the people]. What kind of a joke is this? Bhimrao Ambedkar, the messiah of Dalits, had advised the oppressed classes never to compromise on their self-respect. But we have here a BSP leader who builds up a party on the sweat and blood of Dalits and then sells Assembly seats to the highest bidder, making that person the party's candidate."

The speech is rounded off with the mandatory invocation of Hindutva through a reference to the controversial CD. Though the party's official position is that the CD was not authorised by the leadership, Rajnath Singh does sanctify it in his campaign speeches.

The reference to it goes as follows. "Now a CD has become the centre of a controversy and the clamour from all our opponents is that the BJP should be derecognised. Why are we being subjected to this? Because we tell the truth. It is more important for the BJP to tell the truth than win elections. Those who castigate us as communalists are the ones who are demanding religion-based reservation for Muslims. The BJP will never ever give in to the politics of minority appeasement. We will never allow religion-based reservation to be implemented. We will ensure equal respect for all communities, all religions."

With the correct intonations and dramatic pauses it is a virtuoso performance and the crowd, with a large number of women, loves every bit of it. They applaud repeatedly and raise slogans energetically.

Kalyan Singh's campaign, too, is on these lines. It is a mixture of aggression against political opponents, particularly parties in government, and advocacy of Hindutva. As the person who was the Chief Minister of the State at the peak of the Ayodhya movement and during the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Ayodhya and Ram Mandir do come into Kalyan Singh's speeches from time to time, but the advancement of Hindutva agenda does not revolve around it anymore. The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government's so-called apathy in combating Islamist terrorism and alleged minority appeasement through instruments such as the Sachar Committee Report form its core.

According to BJP activists, the party's recent electoral successes in Punjab, Uttarakhand and Delhi playing the opposition's role has rekindled hope that a similar result can be achieved in Uttar Pradesh. The long hours that both leaders spend every day in campaigning is testimony to this. Both leaders address more than six public meetings a day. The more agile Rajnath Singh stretches this even to eight or 10.

The BJP's overall campaign, spearheaded by these two leaders and wholeheartedly supported by the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), the fountainhead of the Sangh Parivar, has in many ways affirmed that a latent communal feeling persists in the country's most-populous State despite the repeated reverses that Hindutva forces have suffered in the last few electoral battles.

The confidence instilled in the Sangh Parivar rank and file by the two leaders' campaign is, however, diluted by what many activists and observers perceive as a discordant note. This is the repeated reference of each of the leaders to his own term as Chief Minister, trying to present it as the period when the State was administered best. According to BJP activists across the State, the party has witnessed such one-upmanship over the past few years. In terms of realpolitik, this translates into the leaders promoting their own caste support bases - Rajnath Singh the upper-caste Thakurs and Kalyan Singh the Lodhs, an Other Backward Classes community - within and outside the party.

The RSS top brass has reportedly been backing Rajnath Singh since his elevation as BJP president, but this has in no way restrained Kalyan Singh, who is apparently driven by the realisation that his OBC base is crucial for the party. The tussles between the two leaders aggravated in the context of the elections and was the primary reason for the clashes that marred the selection of candidates in a dozen districts.

Commenting on the campaign of the two stalwarts and the state of power play in the party, Lucknow-based political analyst Indra Bhushan Singh, an advocate, said: "It is like a jugalbandhi of two veteran artists who compete to such an extent that they match every right note with a wrong one, creating a jumble of good music and cacophony."