Zee Media Bureau/Manisha Singh
New Delhi: Most would agree that given her inherent quality to be in the limelight, it is difficult for firebrand Bhartiya Janata Party leader Uma Bharti to lie low for a long time. However, off late she had been maintaining a low profile, especially after returning to the BJP after she stomped out of the party in a huff few years back.
Many remember Uma for the prominent role that she played in the Ayodhya Ram Janmabhoomi movement. And many also remember her fiery sloganeering, urging the BJP cadres to build the Ram temple in the nineties. But the women who led the BJP to a three-fourth majority in Madhya Pradesh Assembly in 2003, had to resign as the chief minister of the state in August 2004, when an arrest warrant was issued against her when her name cropped up in the 1994 Hubli riot case.
But the worst blow was when in November 2004 Uma was suspended from the BJP for her much publicized criticism of senior party leader LK Advani. And after the suspension was lifted in 2005, she was expelled from the party for opposing the appointment of Shivraj Singh Chauhan as the CM of Madhya Pradesh.
The party which she subsequently established, the Bharatiya Janshakti Party, failed to create any wave. Thus it was clear to her as well as others that Uma could only be in her element in the BJP, to which she was re-inducted in 2011.
On her return Uma was given the task to reviving the party in Uttar Pradesh. She was of the prominent faces of the BJP in the 2012 Assembly elections in the Hindi heartland. Though she won her seat from the Charkhari constituency, in Mahoba District, the BJP did not do well at the hustings and since then Uma had been more or less lying low, except for surfacing on off regarding the save Ganga campaign.
However, the latest communal violence in Muzaffarnagar in UP seems to have re-energised her and it can be said that she is back in the reckoning. A day after Uma was stopped from entering riot-hit area in Western UP on September 17, she led her part workers in protest outside the state Assembly in Lucknow against the supposed move by the administration to arrest BJP leaders in wake of the warrants issued against them by a local court.
She did not stop at that. In what is her trademark style, Uma threatened the ruling Samajwadi Party of serious consequences if her party leaders were arrested and warned of repercussions. With the political cauldron boiling in UP post the violence in Muzaffarnagar and with the electorate increasingly appearing to be polarised at the moment, probably the hot-headed leader, who seemed to be biding her time till now, feels the time has come for her to take centrestage.
