The local organisers are said to have delayed his arrival at the venue of the meeting by three hours hoping for a miracle that would fill the ground. When Kanshi Ram finally reached the site, he lost his temper seeing the sparsely filled ground. Blasting the organisers, who included the party's 11 MLAs, sitting on the dais, he announced that the MLAs had forfeited their right to be renominated for the November Assembly elections.

State BSP president Dauram Ratnakar was the special target of his attack. Ratnakar is MLA from Bilaspur district. Kanshi Ram wanted to know why there had been no second BSP MLA from the Chhatisgarh region. The public meeting fiasco came after a series of setbacks to KanshiRam. His overtures to the Congress were sabotaged by Chief Minister Digvijay Singh though other leaders like Arjun Singh and Madhavrao Scindia had favoured it. He unilaterally declared his support to Arjun Singh in the Hosghandabad Lok Sabha constituency and the latter suffered the most humiliating defeat of his life -- losing in all the eight Assembly segments. The leaders he had weaned away from the Congress, like Arvind Netam and Narsingh Mandal, returned to the Congress and also took along others with them.

Kanshi Ram then made another declaration: that he would support Congress candidates wherever it appeared such support would defeat the BJP candidates in the Assembly elections. If he was expecting some reciprocal gesture from the Congress, he was thorougly disappointed. The truce between Arjun Singh and Assembly Speaker Shreenivas Tiwari, reportedly at the behest of Sonia Gandhi, is also a disturbing factor for Kanshi Ram as Arjun Singh's sympathies lay with the BSP while Tiwari's staunch pro-uppercaste attitude helped Kanshi Ram exploit the sentiments of the Dalits in the Vindhya region.

All this, though, does not write off Kanshi Ram or his BSP in the state and both the Congress and BJP leaders are aware of it. The fiasco at the Bhopal meeting did not mean that Kanshi Ram has lost his charisma among the Dalits in the rural areas. It was the failure of his state unit office-bearers and MLAs to mobilise the BSP activists. Those who had advised Kanshi Ram to delay his arrival at the site of the meeting by a few hours in the hope that the maidan would fill in were only chasing a mirage. The city dwellers had never been a forte of Kanshi Ram's public meetings.

The BSP's vote bank in Madhya Pradesh has hovered around 8 per cent and that is a substantial number. Kanshi Ram's dream of having enough number of MLAs dictate terms to the next government may not come true. But he is definitely in a position to give a tough time to winning candidates in several constituencies.