New Delhi, Feb. 1: As the Congress hastened to sew up an alliance with the Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh and the rest of the Hindi heartland, the BJP was in a hurry to seal Kalyan Singh’s “homecoming”.

Party general secretary Pramod Mahajan is likely to go to Lucknow on Tuesday, have a final meeting with the former Uttar Pradesh chief minister and announce his return to the BJP from the state capital itself and not Delhi, as planned.

Kalyan’s return, BJP sources said, will be projected with fanfare at the party’s national council meeting on February 7.

The Uttar Pradesh core committee will have its first meeting with BJP chief M. Venkaiah Naidu and his office-bearers here tomorrow. Naidu has set up similar committees for every state and given them charge of election-related work.

Tomorrow’s meeting will be followed by another with the BJP’s elected representatives from the local bodies of Uttar Pradesh.

Naidu today announced the formation of key poll-related panels for resource mobilisation, publicity and election tours and travel.

The publicity committee comprises Mahajan, Arun Jaitley, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Balbir Punj, Dinanath Mishra, Prakash Javadekar, Prabhat Jha and Seshadri Chari.

Chari was the editor of Organiser, the RSS’ English-language mouthpiece. He was recently moved to the BJP, apparently as part of an exercise to induct more Sangh members in the political mainstream. The committee job will be his first assignment in the party.

Former Union minister Ved Prakash Goyal, the BJP’s treasurer for years, was made convener of the resource mobilisation committee. His colleagues on the panel are former treasurers Ramdas Aggarwal and Sukumar Nambiar.