Bhopal, March 19: Having put her stamp on Madhya Pradesh, chief minister Uma Bharti is now thinking bigger: she will team up with Kalyan Singh to unite all the backward classes in the country.

Assisting her will be brother Swami Prasad Lodhi, the most visible face in Bhopal and in the state. He stays in the chief minister’s bungalow with his family and routinely meets all party MLAs and bureaucrats.

Swami couldn’t care less about his loss in the Assembly polls in which the BJP won 178 of 230 seats. He claims he was behind Uma’s transformation from preacher to astute politician and believes she is destined for a bigger national role. “The backward classes in the north and in the south look up to her and I, in my own way, plan to bring all of them under one umbrella,” he said.

As a first step, he will tomorrow invoke the legacy of Rani Avantibai Lodhi, the warrior queen of Ramgarh who participated in the first war of independence in 1857. His objective is to unite Lodhis spread all over northern India, he said.

According to Swami, Rani Avantibai was no less famous than Laxmibai, the Rani of Jhansi. He has drawn up plans to celebrate the Rani’s martyrdom and claims Kalyan Singh will share the dais with Uma tomorrow.

Many others, including Sakshi Maharaj, Gangacharan Rajput, Rambaksh Verma, Deepak Verma, Chhatrapal Singh, Prahlad Patel and backward notables from Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, will participate. “My modest estimate is about a lakh people will gather at tomorrow’s meeting,” Swami said.

Asserting the Lodhis were second to none in sacrificing their lives for the nation, he quoted instances from the Central Provinces District Gazetteers, History of Freedom Movement in Madhya Pradesh (Government Printing, Nagpur) and Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India (Macmillan and Co.).

Swami has also floated a “non-political” outfit called Pragatisheel Lodhi, Kshatriya Sabha and is a patron-in-chief.