The road to Delhi goes via Lucknow

An outright victory in February 2022 could make 49-year Yogi Adityanath a contender for the post of prime minister in the post-Narendra Modi era.

NT Analysis

The race to the elections in Uttar Pradesh is heating up, with Yogi Adityanath all set to become the first Chief Minister of a national party to complete a full, five-year term in Uttar Pradesh. Sending an outsize 80 Lok Sabha MPs to the parliament, UP holds unparalleled significance on the national front. During the 2019 parliamentary polls, the BJP tally was 62 while in the 2017 state assembly polls, it won a staggering 309 out of 403 seats. An outright victory, for Yogi Adityanath, it seems, will leave him primed as the top contender for the Prime Minister’s office. Before the advent of the monk from Gorakhpur, the saffron-flag hadn’t been firmly planted on UP soil for 13 years. And it seems there isn’t much to challenge him.

All eyes are already on the top post, after 2024 or 2027 (when Modi turns 75) steam. Union Home Minister Amit Shah is seen as a natural successor to Modi on account of his clout within the BJP and the Sangh Parivar, his acumen and his informal number two status in the Modi government. Shah is what Sardar Patel was to the Nehru cabinet and L.K. Advani was in the Atal Behari Vajpayee regime.

Still, the long line of second-in-commands have had a chequered past. The country has had seven deputy Prime Ministers in Sardar Vallabhai Patel, Morarji Desai, Choudhary Charan Singh, Jagjivan Ram, Yashwantrao Balwantrao Chavan, Choudhary Devi Lal and L.K. Advani. Only Morarji and Charan Singh made it to the top. And both fought tooth and nail, even breaking parties to fulfill their ambition, which, in the end, proved short-lived. Pranab Mukherjee, Sharad Pawar, Arjun Singh and N.D. Tiwari were all assigned dismal fates, politically speaking.

Will the tide continue to turn in Yogi Adityanath’s favour? A few months ago, Opposition grapevines were pleasantly abuzz with bad tidings for the monk. He had lost favour, they whispered, with the party leadership - the macabre sight of corpses floating down the Ganges as the pandemic brought UP to its knees had drawn public criticism even from senior BJP leaders. It was believed that the saffron-clad monk, limited by the absence of any real links with the Sangh, was headed for oblivion, “not with a bang but with a whimper,” to borrow a phrase from the poet, T.S. Eliot. The fact that he was scheduled to deliver a virtual presentation at the BJP National Executive Meeting last week only lent credence to these prophecies. In the end, that was not how things unfolded. Instead of being side-lined and limited to a virtual appearance, sources say he was phoned by party President JP Nadda and invited to not just be there in person but to deliver the session’s political resolution. It’s a huge privilege - the resolution, which outlines the BJP’s mission statement by outlining the schemes and plans that will shape the party’s governance, is watched closely by the BJP’s ideological mentor, the RSS. Just to put things in perspective, it was the veteran, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, who delivered the resolution in 2017 and 2018. Singh has now been eclipsed by the young, saffron-clad colossus. The Yogi does not hail from the RSS school of swayamsevaks and pracharaks but has managed to enjoy its unreserved backing (Sushma Swaraj, not from the Sangh cadres, was accepted as a leader but only allowed to go so far).

But Yogi, it seems, can do no wrong. The horror at Lakhimpur Kheri, the bloodshed and the body count, should have been enough to break even the most towering leader. But not him. He defused the situation with political panache, using seniors from the Gorakhpur Mutt to rush Rakesh Tikait to the scene of the tragedy. According to media reports, it was Tikait himself who convinced officers to keep the Opposition at bay.

What, then, lies behind this apparent political invincibility? Perhaps it’s sheer optics - a saffron-wearing monk ruling the country’s most politically significant state makes for quite the visual. And the primacy that Yogi was allowed at the National Executive meeting proves that he can put any blunder behind him. Then again, it’s not like the BJP, or the Sangh, to rely entirely on sheer imagery – the party, determined to leave no stone unturned in the run-up to the UP elections next year, is rumoured even to be working covertly with Asaduddin Owaisi. The UP grapevine has it that Owaisi is part of the BJP’s ‘B Team’, poised to polarize the electorate, split the Muslim vote and consolidate the Hindu vote banks.
The 49-year-old has emerged as a titan in right-wing politics, his image as the face of majoritarian politics grows stronger every day. A monk in saffron, who went from an ashram to the