The third big change in the state is the consolidation amongst backward castes that the ascent of the basically Dalit party, the BSP, has forged and forced. The “friendship” between two former UP CMs, Kalyan Singh and Mulayam Singh Yadav, is a big change in not just UP, but possibly national politics — the biggest, on the Babri issue, after the Masjid was destroyed. The Babri Masjid pretty much became a non-factor ever since it was pulled down in 1992. But with pictures of Kalyan Singh meeting the SP supremo, it appears to have got a new lease of life. Mulayam Singh appears to want to brazen it out and is trading charges with the Congress on “who was in power at the Centre when the Mosque came down”. But this relationship could probably be a tough one for the SP to handle since it has become a pivotal point not just for the fact of the Masjid, but the crude communal polarisation that went with it, the statements, the symbol that the Babri Masjid became for Muslims as embodying a sense of “foreignness”.

Kalyan Singh, being the chief beneficiary of the spurt in emotion and the deaths that the communal conflagration resulted in, cannot be just swept aside. Also, memories of his affidavit then, the first cabinet he formed and the centrality of the Babri project don’t help matters. Nor do reprints of reports of his cabinet dashing off to Ayodhya to thank higher powers for state power at the time.

... contd.