Kalyan Singh to merge his party with BJP

The merger will help the latter boost its chances for 2014 Lok Sabha election in Uttar Pradesh

Former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Kalyan Singh on Monday announced that his party, the Jan Kranti Party (Rashtrawadi) will be merging with the Bharatiya Janata Party to help the latter boost its chances for the 2014 Lok Sabha election in Uttar Pradesh.

Singh made the announcement at the BJP’s ‘Atal Shankhnaad’ rally in Lucknow’s Jhulelal Park in the presence of senior BJP leaders from the centre and state.

It took BJP president Nitin Gadkari nearly three years to convince Kalyan Singh to come back to the party. Although Gadkari wanted Singh to join the BJP before the assembly elections in 2012, the decision could not be implemented because some senior leaders of the BJP were not in favour of the decision.

At the time of making Gadkari the president of the BJP, senior members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) had asked him to ensure that all those BJP leaders who had quit the party because of internal rifts must be brought back to the party in order to strengthen its chances in the 2014 general elections.

Gadkari managed to bring back Jaswant Singh, former external affairs minister and Uma Bharati, former Madhya Pradesh chief minister, but could not succeed in bringing back Kalyan Singh because some of the senior leaders of the BJP were opposed to the decision. Kalyan Singh too was annoyed with the BJP for not accepting his demands before the 2009 general election because of which he left the party.

Singh had initially left the party in 1999 after differences with former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee but had returned in 2004 when he was made a BJP candidate from Bulanshahr in Uttar Pradesh. The differences with senior leaders of the BJP in Uttar Pradesh again cropped up in 2009 on the issue of not giving election tickets to people who were chosen by Kalyan Singh. The former Uttar Pradesh chief minister again quit the party and later decided to form his own political outfit, Jan Kranti Party (Rashtrawadi). Singh had also contested and won the Lok Sabha election in 2009 from Etah in Uttar Pradesh where he contested as an independent candidate.

During the 2012 assembly election, after the BJP failed to bring back Kalyan Singh, both parties contested elections but the former chief minister could not win a single seat. Kalyan Singh’s JaKP had a vote share of 2.37 per cent in the state elections. Uttar Pradesh has a total of 403 seats in the state assembly.