By IANS,
Lucknow: Shown the door by Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav and facing a cold reception by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leadership to his rejoining it after two acrimonious exits, former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Kalyan Singh Saturday announced he was setting up his own “pro-Hindutva” party.
The two-time Uttar Pradesh chief minister told mediapersons here Saturday that his supporters wanted him to form an independent political outfit with Hindutva as its chief agenda.
Regretting his decision to part ways with the BJP twice, Kalyan Singh did not hesitate to admit that he has “committed several mistakes in my life. But let me tell you that I believe in learning from my past mistakes,” he added.
He declined to divulge the name of the proposed party, saying the name and its constitution would be announced very shortly.
Stressing that Hindutva and the Ram temple at Ayodhya would be the new party’s agenda, he said as soon as he gets the new party registered with the election commission, he would visit Ayodhya to reiterate his commitment to ensuring the construction of a grand temple at the site where “Lord Ram was installed under a ramshackle shed forming the makeshift temple”.
Reminded of his changed attitude towards that very temple after he had joined hands with one-time rival, the Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav, with whom he eventually decided to part ways after a ten-month alliance, Kalyan Singh said: “Well, that was my biggest mistake”.
Expressing confidence of taking the Ram temple movement to a high pitch again, he said that now it was not a question of building the temple as one already existed there but giving it a “magnificent shape”.
Kalyan Singh, the chief minister when the 16th century Babri Mosque was demolished on Dec 6, 1992, quit the BJP for the first time in December 1999 and formed the Rashtriya Kranti Party (RKP). In 2003, he merged the RKP into BJP, where he was given a warm re-entry. However, he remained sidelined and eventually walked out once again in January 2009.