NEW DELHI: After several failed attempts, Uma Bharati returned to BJP a little more than six years after her fiery harangue in full view of TV cameras at a party meeting where she rebelled against senior leader L K Advani and accused colleagues of malicious off-record briefings.
But for some time now, Advani and RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat have been keen on Bharati's return while BJP president Nitin Gadkari has favoured taking back leaders who parted ways but sought reconciliation like Jaswant Singh. Bharati will have a "prominent role" in the BJP campaign in UP – an arrangement that keeps her out of Madhya Pradesh.
Bharati said she felt like a prodigal who comes home. "Out of the party for five, six years, I have realized that only BJP is my anchor and destination... In these six years, I learnt there is no option other than BJP. I want to forget the last five years," she said. She said her priority will be "Ram Rajya" in UP as a state of "Ram and Roti" and "Mandal and Kamandal". She is understood to have made it clear that her return will not cause problems for Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Chauhan. The CM promptly welcomed her as did others like Sushma Swaraj and Murli Manohar Joshi.
Gadkari's announcement of Bharati's UP assignment will pit her against her old foe Digvijay Singh, Congress's political manager for the state, and whose 10-year rule in Madhya Pradesh she decisively ended in 2003.
Bharati's eventful exit from the BJP meeting chaired by Advani in 2004 was captured by TV cameras that were ironically enough, invited in by a leadership hopeful of projecting a party at work after NDA's defeat.
It took Gadkari more than a year to convince party colleagues and prepare the ground for her readmission, on the cards since at least the 2009 election. Her Lodh credentials, BJP hopes, will give it traction in UP's caste influenced politics. In recent months, she had all but wound up her party.
BJP is banking on her oratory and backward credentials to boost its UP prospects languishing for want of energetic leaders. BJP feels Bharati will give it a profile for the 2012 UP poll and also keep her out of Chauhan's way.
Bharati's return to the BJP fold, if it works out for the temperamental leader, might even help the BJP in Madhya Pradesh where the government will face a 10-year incumbency in 2013.
Referred to as the sexy sanyasin during the Ayodhya agitation, Bharati stormed out of BJP months after being forced to resign as Madhya Pradesh chief minister in August 2004 after an arrest warrant was issued in her name in a 1994 case when she controversially raised the national flag at the Anjuman-e-Islam in Hubli.
Her obvious appeal as a campaigner has always been shadowed by her sharp tongue and what her critics felt was a communally loaded, rabble rousing advocacy of the Ayodhya movement.
With her expectations of rehabilitation as chief minister belied, Bharati's public showdown led to her suspension that was briefly revoked but her protest at Chauhan becoming CM led to her expulsion. The Bharatiya Janshakti Party she set up fared poorly and her challenge fizzled out with Chauhan leading BJP to an unprecedented second term in 2008 and Bharati even lost her assembly seat.
A section of BJP, notably Advani, had been strongly advocating bringing her back and Gadkari went along despite the misgivings of Madhya Pradesh leaders who see her as a threat and are also disconcerted by her maverick ways. But the BJP leadership does recognize that she can be a powerful campaigner.
Although her success proved short lived, she won a thumping three-fourth majority in 2003 when she best Digvijay Singh in a campaign that labeled him "Mr Bantadhar (Mr devastation)". Her soaring popularity was affected by haphazard administration and reports of the influence her nephews had come to wield.
Bharati won four Lok Sabha elections from Khajuraho and one from Bhopal on the trot form 1991 onwards. She was a protégé of the late Rajmata Vijayaraje Scindia who noticed her as a precocious child preacher.
Always an unconventional figure in male dominated politics, Bharati was famous for her fondness for Barbies as well as for driving a white Gypsy jeep around her native Tikamgarh where she was known as didi.
Never far from controversy, her proximity to another expelled BJP leader K N Govindacharya grabbed media coverage in the mid-90s. The alleged affair between the RSS pracharak and the sanyasin became a subject of fierce gossip and part of dirty politics in the BJP where a faction opposed to Govindacharya gleefully whipped the controversy.
TOI
