New Delhi: Three years after former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Kalyan Singh’s death, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is trying to erect him as a symbol of ‘Hindu unity’ as a counter mobilisation against its opponents’ efforts to rejuvenate backward caste politics.
It was under the watch of Singh, a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-groomed Other Backward Class leader, that the Mughal-era Babri Masjid was demolished by a huge mob of Hindutva extremists on December 6, 1992. The RSS and BJP have since then celebrated the criminal act as Shaurya Diwas (valour day) and hailed the ‘karsevaks’ who demolished the mosque as “ram bhakts.”
Now, the BJP has found a new day in the calendar to remember every year – August 21. Ever since Singh passed away on this date in 2021 aged 88, the BJP has commemorated it as ‘Hindu Gaurav Diwas’ or Hindu Pride Day.
Chief Minister Adityanath used the occasion of Singh’s third death anniversary or second Hindu Gaurav Diwas (Wednesday) to pitch for “Hindu unity.”
‘Guarantee of India’s security’
“We need to understand the value of Hindu unity. Hindu is not about some caste, sect or religion. It is not a source of some parochial limits. It is a guarantee of India’s security and the guarantee of India’s unity and integration,” said Adityanath.
The UP CM further stressed on the significance of Hindu unity by saying that till “India’s native Hindu society remains strong, no force in the world can challenge the unity and integrity” of the country. However, Adityanath warned, the day this “unity is broken,” the “foreign conspiracies to divide Indians into sects will be successful.”
At the Hindu Gaurav Diwas event in Lucknow, Adityanath and other senior BJP leaders including deputy CM Keshav Prasad Maurya, recalled Singh primarily for his role facilitating the Babri Masjid demolition. Singh stepped down from the CM post following the demolition, never expressing guilt or regret. In fact, in a speech following the December 6 event, he outlined his conviction that he would never order firing on the karsevaks like Mulayam Singh Yadav had done and would rather give up the CM post.
On Wednesday, BJP leaders eulogised Singh’s resignation post the demolition as a selfless act for the cause of Hindutva. In 2020, a special CBI court acquitted Singh and other senior Sangh Parivar leaders of charges of criminal conspiracy in the Babri case. In court, Singh pleased innocence and told the judge that he, as CM, had taken all solid measures, a three-tier security system, to safeguard the mosque.
Also read: Ayodhya’s Class of 1992: The Key Conspirators
For the BJP’s persistent public narrative, however, it was Singh who oversaw the demolition of the mosque in 1992, paving the way for the eventual construction of the Ram Mandir, following the directions of the Supreme Court.
“If Kalyan Singh was not CM of UP, would the disgraced structure standing at the birthplace of Ram Lalla fall,” asked Maurya.
He claimed that had Singh not been the CM of UP back then, the Babri Masjid would never have been demolished and Ayodhya would have been carved into two with the “ dead bodies” of karsevaks.
In Singh, the BJP had found the perfect blend of backward caste and saffron politics. His Hindutva image backed by his OBC background planted him as a major force in the state politics, and even today, he remains arguably the party’s most important and successful product of social engineering.
Adityanath recalled the firing on kar sevaks under the Mulayam Singh Yadav government in 1990 (October and November) and contrasted it with the stance taken by Singh on December 6, 1992. Singh chose to step down from the CM post than to order firing at the “ram bhakts,” said Adityanath, adding that the OBC leader stood like an “immovable rock” in the face of dual episodes of firing on kar sevaks and attempts to divide Hindus (through Mandal politics).
“He said ‘I won’t let the Hindu samaj be divided. Those stirring the poison of casteism are making the country weak and dismantling its social fabric’,” said Adityanath.
The demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. Photo: Sanjay Sharma/INDIAPIX NETWORK
A ‘Kalyan Singh-type of government’
Singh was the first BJP leader to be elected as CM of UP, way back in 1991. His second tenure, 1997-99, was not as eventful. He is till date the only outright backward caste and mass leader to become a BJP CM in UP.
The Babri Masjid demolition immortalised his political legacy. But he is also remembered by the party for his ruthless policy against alleged crime and corruption. Little wonder that in October 2016, Amit Shah, then BJP president, while campaigning in Etawah promised the state that if his party came to power in 2017, it would replicate a “Kalyan Singh-type of government.” What that meant, was a hardline Hindutva rule and iron-fisted administrative policy.
“During the Kalyan Singh government, the goons were either under the ground or in jail. Kalyan Singh government introduced UP to good law and order,” Shah said in 2016.
Eight years later, with the Adityanath-led government serving its second term, the Kalyan Singh rule still appears to the party’s benchmark. Adityanath himself validated this.
“The zero-tolerance policy implemented by Babuji (Singh) in 1991 is being implemented in the state even today,” said Adityanath on Wednesday.
Singh’s son and former MP Rajveer Singh, who lost his seat in the 2024 election, also drew a parallel between his father and Adityanath.
Both Singh and Adityanath made UP “riot-free” and its society “free from fear,” said Rajveer, adding that it was his father who played a big role in taking the BJP, then considered an urban party, to the nooks and corners of villages.
Maurya, a backward caste RSS-product like Singh, said that the state government under Adityanath was walking in the “footsteps” of the former CM. Referring to Singh ‘s third death anniversary, Maurya called upon party workers to keep the “[Hindu] society united and organized” and not allow those “spreading poison” in it to succeed. An educated guess is that Maurya was referring to the mobilization of marginalized OBC and Dalit castes by the Opposition parties in recent times. His comments came on a day when Dalit groups and parties organized a Bharat Bandh in the country to protest against the Supreme Court’s verdict on the sub-categorization of the quota allotted to Dalit and tribal communities.
Community politics
Since Singh’s death, the BJP has built a statue of him in Lucknow, named a major cancer institute after him and dedicated a new state medical college in Bulandshahr to him. The college was opened by Prime Minister Modi himself months before the recent general election.
In the last two elections, BJP leaders used his name freely to mobilise the Lodh community to which he belongs as well as target Opposition leader Akhilesh Yadav for not turning up to pay tributes after his death, projecting it as a sign of “appeasement” of Muslims and a slight to backward castes.
Singh’s grandson Sandeep Singh is a minister of basic education in the Adityanath government.
On Wednesday, Adityanath said Singh’s life was dedicated to “nationalism” and that he didn’t promote casteism, keeping a distance from the “forces that divide the society.”
Adityanath also reflected on Singh’s Sangh background, saying that he was able to become “a Kalyan Singh,” as he had followed the education he received in the RSS school in his work all his life.
Born into a Lodh Rajput (OBC) family in Atrauli, near Aligarh, in 1932 Singh was groomed in the RSS ideology and in 1967 was first elected to the state assembly as a Jan Sangh candidate. He went on to win from the seat several times. He was also elected as MP twice and served as the Governor of Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh during Modi’s rule, and in September 2019 after completing his term was re-inducted into the BJP.
While the BJP is today trying to plant him as an OBC political icon, his relationship with the party was not always sweet. In 1999, Singh left the party after his verbal attacks on then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He soon returned to party and successfully contested the 2004 election from Bulandshahr. However, he quit for a second time, this time in 2009, over differences over ticket distribution. He ended up doing the unthinkable, joining hands with Mulayam Singh Yadav, his political opponent from the heydays of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. However, that dalliance didn’t last and in 2014, Singh, then an independent MP from Etah, returned to the BJP a few months after sharing the dias with Modi at a rally in Kanpur, Modi’s first venture in the key state as BJP’s PM face. Singh credited his return to the “Modi wave.”
