About yogi, with preJudice
Something is definitely happening in Lucknow. Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath seems to be rattled by the rising criticism against him in the media and from BJP’s allies. It looks like he is also aware of a whisper campaign within the party, questioning his ability to handle a huge state like UP. His close aides say that Yogi is confident of handling his rivals within the party. But he has decided to take the “media bull” by its horns. Many in the national capital were surprised when the CM’s media advisor, Mrityunjay Kumar, wrote a scathing opinion page article a few days ago in a national newspaper to counter a lady columnist’s views which appeared in the same paper earlier. Kumar wrote that her “indictment of UP CM is not backed by any facts”. A former journalist, Kumar belongs to Yogi’s hometown, Gorakhpur. “When political analysis ignores facts and relies solely on received wisdom, the result is something like what she claims—‘Bad news for the BJP’. Her entire argument is based on discredited notions and misleading shibboleths. Her understanding of the situation in Uttar Pradesh is formulaic; it has little to do with the reality,” Kumar wrote. In Kumar’s opinion, the problem with the critics in the media is that they are reluctant to see Yogi’s ground breaking initiatives. For instance, he points out that in 2017 Yogi ensured that English is taught in government schools from the beginning, thus “ending linguistic apartheid”. “But if somebody wants to see only bigotry in Adityanath—or, for that matter, in anybody else— they can cherry-pick their facts,” wrote Kumar. We have learnt that Kumar has been asked by Yogi to write more often in national and regional newspapers, especially Hindi papers, to highlight the CM’s achievements and attack his critics in the media.
My first brush with the drug menace in Rajasthan took place during my two-month long visit to Barmer in 2014. This was after my visit to Punjab and the situation needed urgent redress, but no one believed me when I told them the story. For a long time, political corridors in both New Delhi and Jaipur have either denied the existence of the problem, or have doubted the scale of the problem.
As per a United Nations report, India is wedged between the world’s two largest areas of illicit opium production, the Golden Crescent and the Golden Triangle. This proximity has been viewed as a source of vulnerability, since it has made India both a destination and a transit route for opiates produced in these regions. This fact continues to be important in defining drug trafficking trends on the subcontinent. However, the extent to which heroin seized in the country can be sourced to the diversion of licit opium grown in the country, is a matter which continues to be debated.
Golden Crescent is the route through which drug cartels enter India—mainly Punjab. The clandestine land routes of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan collectively consti-