“Mandate Betrayed: The Fall of the Kalyan Singh Government and the Advent of the SP-BSP Combine Part 14”, MyIndMakers, 31 Aug 2026.

“The dismissal of the Kalyan Singh government in December 1992 and the subsequent decade of political turbulence in Uttar Pradesh constitute one of the most instructive episodes in the troubled history of Indian federal democracy. The imposition of President’s Rule, the subsequent period of instability, and the strange and violent alliance of the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party that followed demonstrated how the centre’s constitutional powers could be weaponised for partisan purposes, how caste-based political formations could achieve electoral success while governing disastrously, and how the people of UP paid the price for a decade of governments more interested in managing social identities than in delivering development.

The Imposition of President’s Rule: Centre’s Political Calculation

President’s Rule was imposed in UP on December 6, 1992 itself with a speed that suggested the Narasimha Rao government had contingency plans ready. The constitutional justification for the breakdown of the constitutional machinery in UP was technically sound given the events at Ayodhya, but the political calculation was transparent. The Congress at the centre had been looking for a pretext to dismiss BJP governments in UP, and three other states (Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Himachal Pradesh) since the BJP’s electoral sweep of 1991, and December 6 provided that pretext.

The Supreme Court’s subsequent ruling that the dismissal of the governments in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Himachal Pradesh, where no incidents comparable to Ayodhya had occurred, was unconstitutional significantly vindicated the BJP’s position. But the damage to UP’s governance had already been done. The six months of President’s Rule that followed the December dismissal were a period of administrative drift, with the state bureaucracy paralysed by uncertainty and the political energy of the BJP’s organisational network dissipated by the legal and political battles flowing from December 6………”

Read the full article at MyIndMakers.