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Yogi Adityanath (C), Uttar
Pradesh's new chief minister, attends his swearing-in ceremony in Lucknow on
March 19, 2017. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's right-wing party on March 18
picked a controversial firebrand leader to head India's most populous state,
where it won a landslide victory last week. After an hours-long meeting with
local BJP legislators, senior party leader M. Venkaiah Naidu announced
44-year-old Yogi Adityanath as Uttar Pradesh's next chief minister. / AFP PHOTO
/ SANJAY KANOJIA (Photo credit should read SANJAY KANOJIA/AFP/Getty Images)
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‘If They Kill Even One
Hindu, We Will Kill 100!’
Meet
Yogi Adityanath, the fire-breathing Hindu nationalist monk who’s leading
India’s largest state on a warpath against Muslims.
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Nationalist leaders are used to dashing liberals’
hopes. In their early periods in power, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, China’s
Xi Jinping, and even Russia’s Vladimir Putin promised to strike a balance
between populism and economic reform and even hinted at moving their countries
in a more liberal direction. That didn’t last. And it looks like Narendra Modi
is following the same regressive path, after the Indian prime minister
appointed rabble-rousing Hindu monk Yogi Adityanath to one of the country’s
biggest political jobs.
Following a landslide victory this month in
elections in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous and important state, Modi
shocked many of his countrymen by appointing Adityanath as chief minister. The
decision makes Adityanath the leader of more than 200 million people — 38
million of them Muslims — and thus one of the most prominent and popular
figures in the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which Modi led
back to national power in 2014.
The
appointment has been greeted with barely disguised dismay by Modi’s more
implacable opponents, notably liberals, and anyone worried about the health of
India’s secular democracy and the fate of its sizable Muslim minority. But it
has also dismayed those who voted for Modi in hopes he would focus his energy
on making the country’s economy more dynamic, including, in private at least,
some moderates within the BJP itself. Adityanath’s appointment was Modi’s
decision, and his alone, meaning it is hard to view it as anything other than a
step toward a kind of majoritarian populism that puts hard-line Hindu demands
above economic development as he gears up to win re-election in two years’
time.
Dressed
in his trademark saffron robes, the shaven-headed Adityanath moved quickly to
describe the BJP’s victory as a rejection of the politics of “Muslim
appeasement.” In a frenetic first week in power, he dominated headlines,
especially by launching a crackdown on slaughterhouses, a move that is popular
among Hindus, who want to see literal sacred cows protected, but which targets
businesses that tend to be owned by Muslims.
Until
this week, Adityanath was a mildly infamous but politically minor figure. A
longtime BJP parliamentarian, he was known mostly as a pugnacious preacher and
firebrand activist. After renouncing his family for clerical life in his early
20s, he rose rapidly to become the mahant
(or chief priest) of a temple in the hardscrabble eastern city of Gorakhpur.
From there, he first built a religious following and then a political career,
where his take-no-prisoners attitude and bellicose rhetoric endeared him to the
BJP’s rank and file.
Although only 44, Adityanath has extensive experience stirring up a mob.
That
his politics are extreme is hard to dispute. Although
only 44, Adityanath has extensive experience stirring up a mob. Like
many politicians in Uttar Pradesh — one of India’s poorest states, and one with
a dismal record for intermingling governance and crime — he has a hefty police
record, with pending charges that include attempted
murder and rioting. Yet it is his talent for fomenting tension between
Hindus and Muslims — who make up about four-fifths and one-eighth of India’s
population, respectively — that has caused the most alarm.
Clips
of his incendiary speechmaking circulated widely in India following his
appointment. In one, the diminutive monk whips
up a crowd with fiery anti-Muslim rhetoric. “If they kill even one Hindu,
we will kill—” he calls out, pausing. “100!” the throng eagerly responds. In
another, members of a radical youth group he founded in his home city are seen
calling, as Adityanath looks on, for Hindu men to rape the corpses of Muslim
women.
Elsewhere,
he spoke
warmly of Donald Trump’s ban on immigrants from Muslim countries, argued
that Hindu religious idols should forcibly be placed in mosques, and called for
his party to press on with plans to build a controversial Hindu temple in honor
of the god Ram on the site of a mosque destroyed by Hindu activists in 1992. Perhaps
unsurprisingly he enjoys warm ties with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS),
the hard-line Hindu nationalist organization from which the BJP originated and
for which Modi, in his youth, was a longtime activist.
I
met Adityanath with a group of journalists and academics at his sprawling temple complex one
morning this month, as Uttar Pradesh’s monthlong election campaign reached its
crescendo. Outside, the scene was peaceful; elderly, bearded sadhus (or holy men) in
orange robes sat cross-legged in nearby buildings while the smell of marigolds
wafted through the air. Inside, Adityanath talked in Hindi with wiry intensity,
sitting alone on a saffron-colored couch in a large windowless meeting room, in
front of a huge portrait of his two predecessors as chief priest.
His
rhetoric that morning was calm but pointed. Gorakhpur is one of India’s most
benighted cities, with rubbish-strewn streets and high levels of crime — the
result of decades of governance marked by lawlessness and graft. Adityanath
claimed that the BJP would curb corruption, but he still blamed much of the
area’s own problems on outsiders, variously criticizing a minister in the
state’s previous government (who happened to be Muslim), Nepali migrants
arriving from over the nearby border, and migrant laborers from nearby Indian
states. Asked about economic reforms, he gave only a brief answer about
farming.
As chief minister, Adityanath must now grapple with two of India’s most dangerous fault lines.
As chief minister,
Adityanath must now grapple with two of India’s most dangerous fault lines. On the one hand, the state suffers deep
divisions over caste and religion, which often descend into violence, most
recently in rioting in 2013. On the other, it is an economic backwater,
enjoying little of the prosperity that has reached parts of India over the last
decade. Many hoped Modi would pick a chief minister able to downplay cultural
tensions and stir up investment. Adityanath seems more likely to do the
opposite.
The decision is
more broadly troubling. Since his election, Modi has styled himself as a
champion of development. His RSS background led many liberals to doubt his
sincerity, but until now he has generally proved them wrong, heading an
administration that has mostly avoided playing politics with religious
divisions while also making reasonable economic progress.
Now, Adityanath’s
arrival has refocused anxieties that Modi will push a far more aggressively
nationalistic “Hindutva” agenda that insists India is a Hindu nation that
should relegate Muslims and Christians to a status as outsiders. “It is a
deeply worrying decision and one that sends all of the wrong signals about Modi
and the kind of government he wants to lead,” says Devesh Kapur, a professor of
political science at the University of Pennsylvania. “[Uttar Pradesh] has more
Muslims than Saudi Arabia. What sort of message does it send to appoint a
figure who is so blatantly bigoted and prejudiced?”
Modi last week offered reassurances that
he and his chief ministerial pick remained focused on economic growth as their
“sole mission.” Yet his appointment remains peculiar. His previous chief
ministerial picks in other states have mostly been fairly moderate, low-profile
figures, if for no other reason than they were unlikely to grow into political
rivals. Although liberal critics often accuse him of deploying dog-whistle
tactics to appeal to hard-line Hindus, the BJP’s recent campaign in Uttar
Pradesh was also notable for having relatively few divisive overtones.
It may be that
the trappings of power will mellow Adityanath and that Modi will keep his focus
on job creation and investment. But it seems more likely that a different
calculation is at play — namely, that Modi thinks the BJP is most likely to win
re-election in 2019 by signaling its support for a more aggressive form of
majoritarian Hinduism, at least in heartland states like Uttar Pradesh. Coming
after last year’s bold but economically questionable “demonetization”
experiment — in which Modi scrapped the two largest-denomination Indian
banknotes as part of a quixotic anti-corruption drive — the appointment smacks
of a further turn toward populism.
Modi has never
been, or pretended to be, a liberal leader. But as he contemplates re-election,
the risk is that he will learn the lessons of other conservative nationalists
before him. In Turkey, for instance, Erdogan rose to power by promising unity
and reform but held onto it by becoming ever more hard-line. So far, Modi has
proved a more moderate force. But if his appointment in Uttar Pradesh is any
indication, that moderation could be about to rapidly disappear.
INTERNET SOURCE: https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/03/30/if-they-kill-even-one-hindu-we-will-kill-100-india-muslims-nationalism-modi/
Yogi Adityanath
(born Ajay Mohan Bisht on 5 June 1972) is an Indian monk and Hindu
nationalist politician who is the current Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, in
office since 19 March 2017.
He
was appointed as the Chief Minister on 26 March 2017 after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won the 2017 State Assembly
elections, in which he was a prominent campaigner. He has been the Member of Parliament from the Gorakhpur constituency, Uttar
Pradesh for five consecutive terms since 1998. In 2008, his convoy was attacked
en route to Azamgarh for an anti-terrorism rally. The attack left one person
dead and at least six persons injured. Adityanath is also the Mahant or
head priest of the Gorakhnath Math, a Hindu temple in Gorakhpur, a
position he has held since the death of his spiritual "father", Mahant Avaidyanath, in September 2014. He is
also the founder of the Hindu
Yuva Vahini, a youth organization that has been involved in communal violence. He has an image as a right-wing populist Hindutva
firebrand.
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