Accounting for 80 of the Lok Sabha’s 543 seats, and a 403-member Assembly, Uttar Pradesh, with its over 15 crore voters, is India’s most politically significant state. Since January 25, 1950, when the United Provinces was renamed as Uttar Pradesh, the state – through 17 Assembly elections — has determined the course of national politics, throwing up a legion of stalwarts, chief ministers, and Prime Ministers. Of its 21 CMs though, only Yogi Adityanath, Akhilesh Yadav and Mayawati have completed a full five-year term, reflecting the intense volatility of its politics. In the line-up of CMs, also lies the truth about the state’s caste equations. Ten of its 21 CMs have been Brahmins or Thakurs. The remaining include three Yadavs, three Baniyas, one Lodh, one Jat, one Kayasth, one Dalit and one Sindhi. A series looking at UP’s political history and changes through its CMs. *** The thirteenth Uttar Pradesh Assembly, which was constituted after the polls in 1996, witnessed the stints, for varying periods, of four chief ministers – Mayawati, Kalyan Singh, Ram Prakash Gupta and Rajnath Singh – following a nearly six-month spell of President's rule. Of these CMs, the most surprising candidature was that of septuagenarian Gupta, who was chosen by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as a “compromise candidate” to resolve the power struggle among various party factions for the post. It is another matter that his tenure lasted for just 351 days. Gupta was born on October 26, 1923 in Jhansi. He did his MSc in mid-forties from Allahabad University, and had deep interest in astrology. He was a Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) pracharak in Allahabad (now Prayagraj) during 1946-52. He had also been associated with the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), the BJP's forerunner, since its formation and was a Member of the UP Legislative Council (MLC) during 1964-1970. He was the deputy-mayor of Lucknow in mid-sixties. He was also the president of the UP BJS during 1973-74. In UP's first non-Congress coalition government headed by Chaudhary Charan Singh, which was formed in 1967 with the BJS as one of the partners, Gupta became one of the two deputy CMs. He contested his first Assembly election in the 1977 UP polls from Lucknow Central and won the seat. In the Janata Party government headed by CM Ram Naresh Yadav, he became the industry minister. He, however, lost from the same seat in the 1980 polls on the ticket of the newly-formed BJP. In 1993 Assembly polls, Gupta again contested from Lucknow Central as a BJP nominee and won. He was appointed as the UP State Planning Commission deputy chairman in1998. After the BJP's lacklustre performance in UP in the 1999 Lok Sabha polls, then party CM Kalyan Singh came under intense pressure from the party leadership to resign. He, however, refused to step down and clear the decks for the party leadership to consider the claims of other CM-aspirants such as Rajnath Singh. In a bid to pick a candidate that should be acceptable to all BJP factions, the BJP leadership zeroed in on the non-controversial, low-profile leader Gupta for the post. He was sworn in as UP's 18th CM on November 12, 1999, after Kalyan's exit from the party. He was elected as an MLC on May 6, 2000. During the term of the 13th UP Assembly, the BJP government, led by different CMs, got the support from various splinter groups of the Congress and the Janata Dal as well as several Independent MLAs, which kept it afloat. A breakaway group of 19 Congress MLAs, headed by Naresh Agarwal (who is now with the BJP after leaving the SP), formed a separate outfit, the Loktantrik Congress Party (LCP). Three of the seven Janata Dal MLAs also formed a new group under Rajaram Pandey's leadership. These groups continued to prop up the BJP regime till the end, even as the saffron camp kept switching its CMs. As the CM, Gupta constantly faced various pulls and pressures within the BJP and from coalition partners outside. He was heading a jumbo 92-member ministry, seeking to balance the conflicting claims and counter-claims of various leaders and groups. He was, however, regularly challenged by several senior BJP leaders, with rumours often doing the rounds that he did not even recognise all his ministers. One of the notable decisions taken by the Gupta government was to grant the OBC status to Jats, with the BJP then eyeing the support of this farming community at the hustings. On October 28, 2000, Gupta was asked by the BJP leadership to resign and make way for Rajnath Singh's elevation as the new CM. On May 7, 2003, the then Atal Behari Vajpayee government appointed Gupta as the Madhya Pradesh governor. He passed away on May 1, 2004, while serving in his gubernatorial position.
