UP Utopia

The road to Delhi, they say, goes through Uttar Pradesh. And nobody is more aware of this than the BJP, going all-out to ensure its victory in the upcoming assembly elections, paving the way for a hat trick in 2024. This week,as politicians hit poll mode, we weigh the import of PM Modi positioning himself – not Yogi Adityanath - as the face of the saffron party’s campaign, the Samajwadi Party forging political alliances and the Congress’ making grandiose promises of allotting half the seats to women but still posing no threat to the BJP.

Ajay Jha

It’s a formula that’s worked before, and could work again. The Bharatiya Janata Party, a past master at coming up with a new cocktail whenever elections are around, has a heady concoction brewing, mixing religion with development to win the crucial Uttar Pradesh state legislative assembly elections.

In the 2019 elections, it was a heavy dose of nationalism with a sprinkling of development. In 2017, it was Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s larger than life image and successful galvanisation of pro-Hindu sentiments that resulted in BJP’s massive victory. And in 2014 it was exploiting anger over prevalent corruption in high places and selling the dream to the masses that every problem India and Indian faced would evaporate the moment the then Gujarat CM becomes the prime minister.

This time around, it is a clever combination of temple and development that BJP is expecting will give it a second successive shot at power in Uttar Pradesh. The tone for this new mix of religion and development was set the moment the saffron-clad Yogi Adityanath, the head priest of Gorakhnath Math, was picked up as UP chief minister after the landslide victory in 2017. Yogi Adityanath was the third MP to emerge from the Gorakhnath Math. His guru, Mahant Avaidyanath and his predecessor, Mahant Digvijay Nath had both served as members of parliament. Mahant Digvijay Nath had played a key role in 1949 when a statue of Lord Ram was installed inside the Babri Masjid.

Ajay Mohan Bisht had left his home in Pauri Garhwal - now Uttarakhand - in 1990, when he was just 18, to participate in the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. He came in contact with Mahant Avaidyanath who christened him Yogi Adityanath and groomed him as his religious and political successor. When Mahant Avaidyanath wished to retire from politics, Yogi Adityanath filled his guru’s shoes as the BJP candidate from Gorakhpur Lok Sabha seat in 1998. He has now won it five times in a row. But like his predecessors from Gorakhnath Math, he was never considered for any bigger assignment. He remained a backbencher, although by then he was recognised as an aggressive orator when the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah duo were presented with the young Yogi – young in age but a veteran all the same, given his cachet of being a fifth term parliamentarian – with no administrative experience - as the best candidate for the Chief Minister’s post.

And what a masterstroke it was! BJP had picked up a doer, a hard taskmaster who did not respect bureaucratic and administrative traditions that breed inefficiency and corruption, and got down to work. The Modi-Shah team had to trim his wings a bit when the ambitious Yogi started believing that he had the qualities to replace Modi as the prime minister. There was a staged rebellion against him, when it appeared that Yogi would have to go, but he was given the lifeline and Yogi quickly fell in line.

However, even his critics are unable to find any loopholes in his functioning. It is widely believed that Yogi played a major role in improving the state’s lamentable law and order situation and in breaking the tradition of the occupant of the CM’s office becoming a law unto themselves.

It also helped since Modi happened to represent the Varanasi seat in the Lok Sabha, painstakingly selected for him by Amit Shah for a greater impact in national politics. Several big-ticket projects were launched, changing the face of the state once jokingly called Ulta (upside down) Pradesh. Highways, airports, metro trains, etc. came into operation. For the first time, Uttar Pradesh voters can do their own comparison as they have two former CMs, in the Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati and the Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, along with Yogi Adityanath to choose from. Yogi’s performance is proving daunting for his opponents.

So much for development. And with the head priest of Gorakhnath Math as the chief minister and serving poster boy of Hinduism, the PM himself representing the holy town Varanasi (Banaras) in the Lok Sabha, the religion-front was taken care of. Push came to shove when the Supreme Court delivered the Ayodhya verdict in November 2019, deciding the decades’ old case in favour of the Hindus who were handed over the controversial land to con