On November 12, 1999, Kalyan Singh was out—replaced by Ram Prakash Gupta. Within a year, Rajnath Singh would take over as Chief Minister.
The lesson was unmistakable: Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s India was not run from Nagpur or Lucknow—but from the compulsions of coalition power and global scrutiny.
The Prime Minister chose stability over street politics, and in doing so, quietly but firmly fired a warning shot at his own party.
The late 1990s saw a bruising face-off within the BJP-RSS, as Uttar Pradesh’s hardliners exposed an internal war between the PM’s restraint and the UP CM’s defiance.
The Sangh Parivar—and even the BJP—has always struggled to explain Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He spoke softly but acted sharply. He courted consensus yet struck decisively. Nowhere was this contradiction more visible than in Uttar Pradesh in 1998–99, where an internal tussle between the Prime Minister and his own party’s chief minister laid bare the fault lines within the BJP.
Vajpayee was often “fired” by the need to refurbish both his image and that of his fragile NDA government.
After the May 1998 nuclear tests, India faced crippling US sanctions. Vajpayee had to push economic reforms abroad while reining in ideological hardliners at home. The challenge was not merely Home Minister L K Advani, his close ally, but Advani’s acolytes—most notably Kalyan Singh, the then Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister.
The flashpoint came with the Vande Mataram–Saraswati Vandana controversy. In December 1998, Ravindra Shukla, Minister of State for Basic Education in UP, was abruptly sacked—at Vajpayee’s insistence. The charge: misleading the Prime Minister and the state cabinet on making Vande Mataram mandatory in government primary schools under the Kalp Yojana.
The directive triggered protests from Muslim leaders and Islamic scholars, who called it “un-Islamic.” Vajpayee panicked—not ideologically, but politically. Coalition partners like George Fernandes’ Samata Party and Chandrababu Naidu’s TDP could have walked out.
Stability mattered more than symbolism.
Shukla became the fall guy. Officially, he was accused of a “serious breach of trust” for keeping the cabinet in the dark. Unofficially, he was sacrificed to douse a political fire. The irony? Shukla claimed the order had been issued back in July 1997, when Mayawati was Chief Minister, and was already being implemented. Vajpayee, during a Lucknow visit, publicly said: “No such order was issued.” The verdict was sealed.
The RSS was displeased. Shukla was its nominee in the Kalyan Singh ministry. But Vajpayee overruled sentiment. Kalyan Singh was summoned to Delhi; Shukla was shown the door. Even the Basic Education Secretary, R C Dwivedi, was removed.
Behind the episode lay a deeper BJP civil war. Kalyan Singh faced rivals on all sides—Kalraj Mishra, Lalji Tandon, and an ambitious Rajnath Singh, then UP BJP president. The Vande Mataram row became the perfect pretext to clip Kalyan Singh’s wings.
Defiant to the end, Shukla said he did not regret sacrificing office “for sticking to my ideals.” Kalyan Singh tried damage control, even declaring 1999 as ‘Vande Mataram Year’ in UP. It didn’t save him.
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| M M Joshi, Kalyan Singh, Advani |
(Courtesy - The Raisina Hills website )
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