Law and disorder: How Yogi raj pushed UP deeper into hellhole

Vikram Joshi, a Ghaziabad-based journalist, was shot dead by goons because he had earlier objected to eve-teasing of his niece by them and also had a tiff with the local satta (gambling) mafia. Rajendra Mishra, father of a serving Army officer, was bludgeoned to death and his pregnant daughter-in-law was also beaten over a land dispute in Amethi. A mother-daughter duo, also from Amethi, attempted self-immolation right in front of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s office Lok Bhawan.

That these were the day-to-day headlines over the past week speaks volumes about the law and order situation in Uttar Pradesh under Yogi Adityanath, an alien insider in the Sangh Parivar, who was pitchforked into chief ministership by the RSS.

In fact, when the BJP swept the 2017 March Assembly polls in UP winning 325 out of 403 seats, no chief ministerial candidate had been projected. Although Yogi was in the race, he was not the frontrunner. He always had a troubled relationship with the Jan Sangh-BJP as he and his guru Mahant Avaidyanath hailed from the Hindu Mahasabha stock and came into the BJP fold only after LK Advani’s Ayodhya Rath Yatra.

Even after joining the BJP and winning the Gorakhpur Lok Sabha seat, he maintained his own saffron vigilante storm-trooper outfit Hindu Yuva Vahini as his power base and carefully cultivated the image of a toughie in politics.

When the RSS top leadership felt there was a leadership vacuum within the BJP despite the impressive victory in 2017 and the absence of a leader who could unify disparate caste factions and rise above sub-regional groupings to tackle the onerous challenges of governance and development in UP, their choice was Yogi Adityanath.

They have now been proved wrong.

Sinking deeper

The challenges to be tackled in UP were enormous indeed. With 2,40,445, 2,41,980 and 2,82,171 cognisable crimes in 2014, 2015 and 2016, UP topped the crime list in the country successively. It is not just a law and order problem; it simply shackles development thanks to extortion and other forms of rent-seeking.

Yogi Adityanath’s choice as CM by RSS was because they hoped that he would be a strongman. Unable to propose any other suitable alternative, Modi also fell in line with the RSS’ choice. But the cardinal mistake of the RSS and Modi was that they chose a man without an alternative vision for industrialisation and economic development.

The RSS didn’t have a development blueprint of its own either. The result is a drift of a different kind. Yogi is given to excesses. He has never been known for moderation in anything he does. To impress the RSS top leadership and Modi and be in their good books, he always tends to engage in extreme acts for posturing.

Moreover, with his caste of Rajputs comprising only 7.2% of the population, socially he is not on a strong wicket. Senior journalist Dilip Choubey says, “Brahmins, and sugarcane farmers who are mostly from the Jat community in western UP, are angry with Yogi. There is also some unrest among OBCs and MBCs, (most backward castes) like Mauryas, Patels and Kushwahas. They feel they have not gained anything from the Yogi Raj. Brahmins are waiting to see whether BSP chief Mayawati sticks to firm anti-BJP position before deciding to choose between the Congress or Mayawati.”

The MBCs-OBCs, he adds, have no option other than getting back to SP chief Akhilesh Yadav’s fold. “By the time of March 2022 assembly polls, Yogi might be in trouble.”

Encounter raj

In the name of tackling crime, Yogi initiated an ‘encounter raj’. As many as 122 criminals were killed and more than 2,000 had bullet injuries in more than 6,000 encounters between March 20, 2017 (when Yogi took over) and July 10, 2020 — proudly declared Additional DGP (Law and Order) Prashant Kumar on July 17.

Former IGP SR Darapuri tells The Federal, “Encounters have become a state policy in UP. 60% of the victims are Muslims and there is a large number from MBCs and Dalits too. The CM and Deputy CM Maurya themselves have several criminal cases against them, including murder cases. Both the police and bureaucracy under them have become casteist, communal, criminalised and unruly.”

‘Bahubali raj’ and the ‘Police raj’ are Siamese twins. No bahubali (strongman) can operate without collusion with the police, and they operate within the space created by the officialdom. Sometimes this tenuous balance gets disrupted and the situation goes out of hand as it happened in the recent Vikas Dubey case. Nobody here in UP believes the cooked-up story about Dubey’s killing.

The Yogi government itself sort of admitted to this criminal-police collusion when they arrested a sub-inspector for tipping off Vikas Dubey, and transferred 100 policemen from Kanpur (rural range) for being on the payrolls of Dubey.

But Yogi’s extreme ways didn’t work with the economy or with COVID-19. The laws of economy or the pandemic wouldn’t respect any strongman’s muscle power.

A senior government official, who doesn’t wish to be named, says: “All development works have come to a standstill. Even the much-hyped Buddhist Circuit work and the work on the Gomti Riverfront Development Project have been halted. A 2017 inquiry report had alleged irregularities in this Rs 1,550-crore Gomti project launched by the controversial Shivpal Yadav, the minister for irrigation in the earlier SP government.”

He goes on to add that all that Yogi had done is to appoint one more committee to examine the recommendations of this committee. “So much for Yogi’s anti-corruption credentials. Even the work on Gorakhpur-Maharajganj four-lane road, being monitored by the PMO directly, is proceeding at snail’s pace.”

Corruption, COVID-19 and a comatose govt

Despite a misleading slow start, COVID-19 cases are witnessing a late spike and spreading to hinterland districts of late. Starting his reign bearing the brunt of the debilitating demonetisation of Modi, and not doing anything to stimulate the sagging economy during the economic slowdown, all Yogi can do about the COVID-19 crisis is to enforce a brutal lockdown without having any clue as to how to meaningfully ‘unlock’.

UP is not known for large-scale industries but informal clusters like handloom and powerloom clusters in Varanasi, leather and footwear clusters in Agra and Kanpur, lock units in Aligarh, carpet works in Badohi, Mirzapur, Sonbhadra, Shajahanpur and Jaunpur, Chikan embroidery in and around Lucknow, glassware units in Firozabad, wooden toy clusters in Chitrakoot and terracotta units in Yogi’s own Gorakhpur district etc., employing lakhs of artisans and workers, are the mainstay of the UP economy.

These industries are yet to revive normal production because of continuing curbs on local transportation and undeclared power cuts of three-four hours every day. Yogi failed to keep his promise of no power-cut in towns and industrial clusters.

The number of educated unemployed youth in UP increased by 12.5 lakhs in the last two years of the Yogi government to reach 34 lakhs, and it allocated only ₹130 crore for their skill development.

Out of a budget of ₹5 lakh crore (for 2020-21) — for a large state with a pathetically low GSDP of only ₹17.9 lakh crore (as against the GSDP of ₹20.97 lakh crore of Tamil Nadu with one-third of its population) — nearly ₹4 lakh crore is spent on salaries for the monstrous bureaucracy and other committed heads of revenue expenditure. The new schemes barely get ₹10,967.87 crore. But the budget flaunts a surplus of ₹27,451 crore. Uttar Pradesh spends exactly the same share of its budget expenditure on police as it spends on health.

Development in UP displays sharp contrasts. One can see posh and swanky housing colonies and gated communities mushrooming in the vastly expanding peri-urban areas in cities like Lucknow and Varanasi, but the tragic reality is that underground sewerage coverage in urban areas of the state is only 24 per cent (as of 2020). All three CMs in recent times were obsessed with mega projects like freeways while 29.43 per cent of the state population is below the poverty line.

The MGNREGA wage in UP at ₹201 is among the lowest in India and sugarcane farmers are on an agitation over ₹14,000-crore cane dues. An unconstitutional three-year holiday from labour laws is the only step Yogi could think of for reviving the sagging industry.

The problems are proliferating and getting acute under Yogi, but he is busy preparing for the inaugural foundation stone laying ceremony for the Ram temple at Ayodhya by Modi on August 5. Probably, they are hoping that Ram temple would be the magic wand with which they can wish away all the problems.