THE YOGI OF & FEAR
PRIME MINISTER NARENDRA MODI AND AMIT SHAH CHOOSE A HINDUTVA HARDLINER TO DELIVER THEIR PROMISE ON GOOD GOVERNANCE IN UP
What prompted the BJP to choose hardline Hindutva leader Yogi Adityanath as the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh?
Cover by BANDEEP SINGH Photo montage by AMARJEET SINGH NAGI
On March 21, the 44-year-old Yogi Adityanath, five-term MP from Gorakhpur and the new chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, gave his final address in the Lok Sabha. An unusually mellow Adityanath, clad in his trademark saffron attire, promised to transform UP into a model state, “free from the prejudices of caste and religion, riots and anti-social activity”. “I will invite all of you to see the new Uttar Pradesh,” he said. Part of the transformation—that of Adityanath himself from firebrand Hindutva icon to a messiah for development—had evidently begun.
However, few recent announcements have been as startling as the party’s March 18 decision to appoint the stocky yogi from eastern UP chief minister of India’s largest state.
The chorus of alarm was not unexpected. Adityanath, whose political career began in 1998, has a well-documented record at making vitriolic anti-Muslim speeches. “When I speak, thousands listen... When I ask them to rise and protect our Hindu culture, they obey. If I ask for blood, they will give me blood... I will not stop till I turn UP and India into a Hindu rashtra,” Adityanath had said at a rally in 2009. One of five private member bills he introduced in the Lok Sabha last year was for changing the name of India to Hindustan in Article 1 of the Constitution. In November 2015, he targeted Shah Rukh Khan for suggesting there was intolerance in the country, saying there was no difference between the language of the actor and Hafiz Saeed. “If a huge mass of people boycotted his films, he will have to wander on the streets like a normal Muslim,” he had said.
The Modi-Shah CM pick took even senior cabinet ministers by surprise. Adityanath vaulted over other contenders—home minister Rajnath Singh, UP BJP president Keshav Prasad Maurya and minister of state for railways, Manoj Sinha. Maurya, the party’s OBC face, was appointed deputy CM, as was Dinesh Sharma, a Brahmin.
With Adityanath at the helm, the Opposition predicted, the state would slide back to the uncertainty of the mandir-masjid days and polarisation. “No more pretence! Yogi Adityanath to sit where Pantji, NDT (Narayan Dutt Tiwari), Bahugana et al once sat. Great test PM has put BJP trolls to. Explain this,” senior Congress leader Salman Khurshid tweeted.
To many, Adityanath’s swearing-in on March 19 may have seemed like a carefully worked-out plan, a return to the BJP’s hardline Hindutva agenda after a campaign promising development. However, party sources reveal that the yogi’s appointment was not a given. His selection had less to do with his Hindutva leanings and more to do with electoral calculation and the BJP’s promise of corruption-free government. Else, party insiders say, it would not have taken them a week to announce his name.
In the aftermath of their thunderous victory in UP, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah were unlikely to have missed a worrying trend. The total votes polled by the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party exceeded the BJP’s vote share by four percentage points. This meant that had UP’s two largest parties joined hands, they could have stopped the BJP’s victory march. Modi and Shah believe the entire Opposition will be ranged against them in 2019. A Bihar-style mahagathbandhan (grand alliance), which brought the saffron party to its knees in the 2015 state elections, could well become a national reality in 2019. In UP, where the BJP scored its largest block of 71 Lok Sabha seats in 2014, this could be an insurmountable obstacle between Modi and victory. Hence, winning UP for the party in 2019 was one of the key pre-requisites for the candidates the duo scanned. The names included those of Maurya, Sinha and Rajnath Singh. All three leaders, including Rajnath Singh, were keen on the job, driven perhaps by the BJP’s brute majority in the UP assembly, which assured them a stable tenure.
Their names, however, were crossed out for various reasons. Rajnath Singh, 65, was seen as past his prime. Maurya was seen as too soft to be able to deal with the harsh political realities of India’s largest state. Sinha, 55, was perceived as intelligent but laidback. BJP president Shah was the most vocal proponent of Adityanath’s candidature. The prime minister was initially uncomfortable with the yogi’s name for two reasons. One, his polarising speeches clashed with Modi’s new ‘pluralist’ image and, two, Adityanath had stridently opposed him before 2014, when he felt Modi had gone soft on Hindutva. This was the time when Adityanath identified himself more
with the VHP than the BJP. The PM gave his assent only after Shah brokered an agreement whereby the yogi would not only eschew ‘VHP-type Hindutva’ but also rein in his saffron followers. His primary task, however, would be to end corruption and nepotism. Modi and Shah believe that if Adityanath pulls the state out of its legacy of maladministration, the political message from India’s largest state could reverberate across the country.
At around 3 am each day, Adityanath rises in his modest bedroom at the sprawling Gorakhnath mutt. After performing puja, he heads towards the mutt complex before turning towards the cowshed, where he feeds the cows jaggery. After a breakfast of fresh gram, porridge and fruit, he sits in his office within the complex from 9.30 am to 11 am, hearing out the steady stream of constituents who turn up to air their grievances and seek his intervention. There are property disputes and family quarrels, all of which he tries to help resolve. Muslims too flock to him to remedy their problems; some of his close aides are Muslim and a lot of the patients who come to the 400-bed charitable hospital in the mutt complex are Muslim. The management of the four dozen-odd educational, health and other institutions the mutt runs in Gorakhpur and Maharajganj districts have equipped him with administrative skills.
Born Ajay Singh Bisht, son of Thakur forest ranger Anand Singh Bisht, he studied near his native village in Panchur in Pauri Garhwal till Class 10 and then went to Kotdwar. He did his BSc Mathematics from a college in Rishikesh. His secretary and collegemate R.S. Rawat says Adityanath always had a spiritual bent of mind. “He was a great devotee of Lord Hanuman and used to fast every Tuesday,” he says.
Soon after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992, Adityanath got in touch with Mahant Avaidyanath, head of the Gorakhnath mutt in Gorakhpur and a BJP MP. He would initially visit him at his MP bungalow in Delhi and then started going to his mutt in Gorakhpur. The mahant was evidently impressed with his spritual fervour and enrolled him as a disciple.
Joining the Nath Sampradaya of Sanatani Hindus, which transcends caste lines, was an advantage. This was one more reason that weighed in Adityanath’s favour, as the sampradaya extends across the country and the BJP hopes Adityanath’s appeal will cut across caste lines at a national level as it does in UP right now. The Modi-Shah calculation is that if Adityanath succeeds even partially as an administrator, he would have few opponents either from the Opposition or within the BJP.
The party expects him to deliver on law and order and change the UP government’s reputation for bestowing favours into a record of dispensing justice. The expectations on the law and order front are also based on the fact that the rise of Adityanath the strongman ended the reign of gangster-politicians like Harishankar Tiwari and Virendra
Pratap Shahi in Gorakhpur, the wild east of UP.
Adityanath first figured in Shah’s reckoning when a pre-demonetisation electoral survey by the BJP in UP gave the party 250 plus seats. Any fewer seats and the top BJP leaders would have opposed his name, for various reasons, whether for his brusque ways, his anti-Muslim rants in a party coming out of the deep saffron shadow or for the fact that he might overshadow them on the national turf in the coming years. His disavowal of the culture of bhai-bhatijavaad (nepotism) made him seemingly impervious to influence and nepotism.
When the BJP’s post-demonetisation survey gave it 306 seats, Adityanath had already emerged as a key CM contender. Shah believed he was the perfect man to stem the administrative rot in UP. “Yogiji has a very strict stance against nepotism,” says UP BJP spokesperson Chandramohan. “He believes in dispensing justice, not extending favours. Like Modiji’s arrival gave a shock to UP’s favour-driven culture, Yogiji is giving shivers to middlemen and favour-seekers.” A source close to the BJP high command says Adityanath has been selected for two things UP needs the most to pull it back from the brink: his clean image and unrelenting work in the pursuit of the cause he espouses. “However, he should know that the days of strident Hindutva are over,” he says. Kirtivardhan Singh, BJP MP from Gonda, adds, “Calls to the CM for transfers and postings are out, because people fear Yogiji’s incorruptible aura.”
Meanwhile, Adityanath’s criticism of Modi turned to respect after he managed to get 71 seats in UP in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls without mentioning Ram or any other emotive Hindutva issue. It convinced the yogi that the saffron rhetoric did not work at the ballot boxes as effectively as raising the aspirations of the people and limiting Hindutva to opposing the Muslim appeasement by rival parties.
Having become CM, Adityanath hit the ground running. In his first cabinet meeting after taking over, he advised his ministers to exercise restraint and refrain from indulging in demagoguery or vendetta. He then gave the party manifesto to his senior bureaucrats and asked them to make plans to realise its promises.
On his third day in office, the new CM asked state chief secretary Rahul Bhatnagar to direct police stations to clamp down on unlawful activities and track down wanted criminals. He also wanted anti-Romeo squads formed to curb sexual harassment. A drive to close illegal slaughterhouses saw queues of butchers seeking licences.
“I am yet to see a chief minister handing over the party manifesto to the bureaucracy on his first day in office and asking them to work on it. This shows both his dynamism and authority,” says Bharat Pandya, a senior BJP leader in Gujarat. Senior SP leader Ram Gopal Yadav said he will observe Adityanath for six months before judging him.
In his farewell address in the Lok Sabha, Adityanath reminded the House about how he had freed Gorakhpur from gang wars, riots and abductions for ransom. As he sets out to try and replicate these achievements in UP, he will do so with the knowledge that no politician will be as closely watched as he will be in the next few years.