Leader of India’s biggest state boosts Hindu right agenda

BISHARA: When India’s prime minister named a hard-line Hindu known for his anti-Muslim speeches to head its largest state Uttar Pradesh (UP) this month, many saw it as a sign his party’s huge election win had emboldened him to pursue a more radical agenda.

But in the village of Bishara in UP, where a Muslim man was lynched by his Hindu neighbors in 2015 triggering a national outcry, residents celebrated into the night by letting off fireworks and dousing each other with festive colored powder.

It was a sign of the popularity of Yogi Adityanath, a 44-year-old firebrand Hindu priest known for his inflammatory rhetoric against Muslims, who make up nearly 20 percent of the northern state’s population.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) appointed Adityanath after winning a landslide election victory in UP, home to 220 million people and seen as a bellwether of national politics.

Modi has frequently sought to downplay his party’s Hindu nationalist agenda since taking power in 2014 in India, a Hindu-majority but officially secular country with a significant Muslim minority.

But the appointment of a Hindu hard-liner to head its most populous state has raised fears it will implement its ideology of “Hindutva” more aggressively in the future.

Hindutva, which roughly translates as “Hinduness,” aims to create a Hindu homeland free from “foreign” communities such as Muslims and Christians, whom adherents perceive as a legacy of successive invasions since the eighth century.

Manini Chatterjee, national affairs editor at The Telegraph newspaper, described it as “a kind of a declaration of war against the secular state.”

“It is saying ‘we are unapologetic about who we are’,” he said.

“Their reading of the UP verdict is that UP and India in general is ready for this aggressive Hindutva.”

Bishara is only around 30 kilometers (20 miles) from central New Delhi, but it only has electricity from seven in the evening to the next morning.

Potholes cover the village’s main road, and jobs are in short supply.

Asked what she hopes to get from the priest-turned-politician, who shaves his head and often drapes himself in a saffron-colored robe, Rana said simply, “development.”