BSP withdraws support to UP govt

Sharat Pradhan in Lucknow

In a dramatic turn of events, the Bahujan Samaj Party on Sunday pulled out of its seven-month-old alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party in Uttar Pradesh, leaving the 28-day-old Kalyan Singh-led coalition in peril.

UP Governor Romesh Bhandari has called a session of the state assembly on Tuesday, October 21, to give Kalyan Singh an opportunity to prove his majority in the House. This came as a pleasant surprise to the BJP which had perhaps not expected such a 'fair' decision from a governor who had, more often that not, been accused of a 'partisan' approach to issues.

Addressing the media shortly after meeting the governor, the chief minister said he was ''confident of proving our majority".

Former chief minister Mayawati, Kalyan Singh's bete noire, however, was adamant that the BJP government should be dismissed immediately. In her five-page letter to the governor, withdrawing support to the government, the BSP leader also sought dissolution of the state assembly. ''Declare fresh elections immediately,'' she demanded.

''Kalyan Singh's government is now in a minority, and he has no business to continue,'' Mayawati said, expressing grave apprehensions about the possibility of 'horse trading'.

Explaining the reasons for pulling out of the alliance, Mayawati said the BSP could no longer tolerate the BJP's ''anti-dalit approach and actions".

The order curbing the misuse of the Scheduled Castes and Tribes Atrocities (Prevention) Act ''glaringly reflects the BJP's anti-dalit mentality''.

Asserting that the dalit law was never misused during her tenure, Mayawati alleged that the law has been slapped on the state to vicitmise the backward classes. The fact that only the dalit law was singled clearly established this, she said, asking, ''Why were not similar orders issued with regard to other laws like the Gangster Act and the Goonda Act whose victims were largely the dalits?"

Another reason was the large-scale transfer of ''senior bureaucrats and police officials belonging to the dalit community and the BJP's conspiracy to rename the newly formed Shahuji Maharaj Nagar district''. The BSP would not ''tolerate the change''.

Mayawati also saw grave law and order problems if the Kalyan Singh government continued. ''The BJP will create communal tension in the state," she said, reversing her stand on Kalyan Singh's visit to Ayodhya immediately after assuming the chief minister's office. ''There was nothing objectionable in the visit'' she had said at that time. Now she found it a grave security risk, considering ''the Muslims's genuine fears''.

Mayawati's letter also alleged that the BJP was conspiring to stab the BSP in the back. "The BJP's designs to cheat the BSP were visible right from the beginning. We knew that they wanted to form a government on their own by indulging in horse trading. That was why we had demanded a change of the speaker, who is a BJP member. But they did not agree."

According to the former chief minister, the BJP did not abstain from horse trading, as it had promised its ally. ''The BJP leaders have been sending feelers to some MLAs, including some belonging to our party, to cross over."

To ''prove'' her contention, state BJP chief Rajnath Singh's statement this week came in handy. "If the BSP wants to pull out of the alliance, let them do so. We are confident of forming a government on our own," he had said. She claimed that Singh's statement was the last straw.

Governor Bhandari took refuge in the Supreme Court ruling in the S R Bommai versus the Union of India case -- a government's majority, the apex court had said, could be proved only on the floor of the House -- and acceded to Kalyan Singh's request that he be given an opportunity to prove his majority in the assembly.

The 175-member BJP needs the support of 38 legislators to stay in power in UP. The state assembly has a strength of 425 legislators.

Defending his decision to give the chief minister just two days to prove his government's majority, the governor said the other political parties had expressed the apprehension that the BJP may indulge in horse trading and win the required number of legislators to its side.

While the chief minister did not comment on the governor's decision, the Congress and Samajwadi Party felt that Bhandari should have dismissed Kalyan Singh immediately.

UP BJP party leader Rajnath Singh has convened an emergency meeting of BJP legislators at 1500 hours in Lucknow on Monday.

When reporters asked BJP spokesman Yashwant Sinha in Delhi whether any other political party had promised the BJP support in proving its majority in the assembly, he said the chief minister must have some basis when he had asked the governor for time to prove its majority.

Pramod Tiwari, leader of the Congress legislature party, argued that the chief minister should not have been given time to prove his majority in the assembly as the government was formed after it had proved its majority. Kalyan Singh, Tiwari said, headed a coalition government and had lost the right to remain in power after his coalition partner withdrew from the alliance.

Congress president Sitaram Kesri felt the United Front must explore the possibility of forming a non-BJP government in UP. The BJP, he told reporters in Chandigarh, does not have enough support to form a government on its own without engineering defections. The Congress had an alliance with the BSP for last year's assembly election.

However, the BSP-Congress alliance's hopes of forming a government in UP came unstuck when the United Front refused to back Mayawati for the chief ministership, at Defence Minister Mulayam Singh's instance. Mayawati and Mulayam Singh fell out after the latter leader's supporters attacked Mayawati when the BSP withdrew from the BSP-Samajwadi Party government in May 1995.

Since no party could form a government, President's Rule was imposed in the state. This was widely interpreted as proxy rule by the Samajwadi Party. BSP, BJP and Congress politicians alleged that Governor Romesh Bhandari was in cahoots with Mulayam Singh.

Rediff On The NeT columnist T V R Shenoy is reported to have set up a meeting between BJP president Lal Kishinchand Advani and BSP supremo Kanshi Ram at his daughter's wedding in Madras in March. The meeting went off well, and both men decided to have a further meeting in Delhi with their colleagues.

The Delhi summit worked out a power sharing arrangement where the BSP would head a coalition government for the first six months, and the BJP would head the administration for the next six months. The arrangement would be reviewed after a year. It took less than seven months for the arrangement to come apart.

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