Yogi Adityanath: The Last Action Hero

THE WORDS IN Uttar Pradesh (UP) Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s vocabulary are a blunt instrument. Like the bulldozers he routinely sends out to supposedly level the playing field of justice, his unfiltered words bludgeon their way to the top of the national talking points trend list.

And so it was with his “batenge toh katenge” (divided you shall perish) remark packaged as advice to the Hindus of India. The Opposition, which prides itself as the self-professed keeper of the secular-liberal flame, reacted predictably. Its big guns accused Adityanath of communal polarisation. Of baselessly demonising Muslims in a cavalier bid to heighten Hindu anxieties to consolidate BJP’s saffron base.

The Opposition might even be right. Adityanath’s remarks could very well be a deeply thought-through political provocation.

Adityanath has but a few weeks before Assembly bypolls to 10 consequential seats are held in his state. This will be the first electoral test for BJP after the recent Lok Sabha elections where its ability to consolidate the Hindu vote had noticeably withered. An unabashed invocation of well-worn Hindutva tropes, the UP chief minister may be hoping, will win back all the subordinate castes that have drifted away from BJP over the last few months. It is estimated that because of the drift of Dalit-MBC votes, BJP lost at least 20 seats in the Lok Sabha polls.

The chief minister’s utterances have a fair chance of affecting counter-polarisation since where they lack in subtlety they make up in substance.

History informs us that whenever Hindu unity has plummeted, they have suffered as a community.

Before Independence, the British exploited and reinforced existing caste, linguistic and religious fissures, creating new categories and subcategories to fragment the Hindu population. Isolated and walled off behind their own prejudices and suspicions, the majority community was crushed under the jackboot of British colonial masters.

It took Mahatma Gandhi to unite Indians, Hindus in particular, by promising a “Ram Rajya”. This was the first time Hindu religious iconography was woven into the tapestry of the freedom movement. The British, ever alert to opportunity, used Gandhi’s ‘Idea of India’ to play on Muslim anxieties. The Muslim community’s self-appointed guardian, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, fell for it and warned Muslims of the alleged downside of living in a “Hindu India”. He promised Muslims that he would build a veritable Noah’s Ark where their interests would never be “subsumed by the Hindu majority”.

The birth of Pakistan would arguably sow the seeds of ‘Muslim separatism’ in the subcontinent.

Its full implications are still playing out. In Kashmir, for one, in the late 1980s, the Muslim majority in pursuit of its own version of Pakistan turned on the Hindu minority with devastating consequences for inter-faith relations.

That such xenophobia never became a talking point underlines Adityanath’s point.

Hindus of the time were so distracted and divided by Mandal politics that no Hindu of any consequence spoke up for justice. And even when some centre-left politicians ultimately did, they did so softly for fear of upsetting their considerable Muslim vote banks.

All BJP had to do in the late 1980s and 1990s was to step in and appeal to a nascent sense of siege among some Hindus. And it did. And very successfully, too.

This forced the non-BJP parties to politically oppose the saffron party’s mobilisation of the ‘wounded’ Hindu vote.

One distinct Opposition stratagem was to sow the seeds of anti-Hindu majoritarianism. This ploy continues unabated to this day. BJP’s upper-caste base has been singled out as the cause of all social prejudices afflicting the polity.

For a while BJP was able to overcome the Opposition’s strategy. Moditva was BJP’s secret sauce and it consolidated Hindus in its favour. But as the results of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls demonstrate, Moditva’s appeal appears to have maxed out. The Opposition’s riposte fashioned from the ideas of post-Mandal politics appears to have led to counter-mobilisation against the Modi-powered BJP.

More than ever BJP needs a more unapologetic ‘Hindu Hriday Samrat’. Is Yogi Adityanath that leader? Can he reverse BJP’s loss of influence over its grand Hindu social coalition? Are his recent remarks an exploratory attempt to find that emotive issue that brings Hindus of every stripe together?

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