Yogi’s UP is not my kinda place

 

Read the report from DNA

A gang in Yogi Adityanath’s Uttar Pradesh has put out a rate chart. Just 5000 rupees for thrashing your rival and a mere 55,000 for killing him. Dirt cheap, I should say. I certainly wouldn’t like to be killed for such a low sum. Even dogs are priced higher in other places.

However, we don’t need be surprised. In Yogi’s UP anything is possible. It is the crime centre of the human world. In 2019, UP accounted for nearly 15% of all registered crimes against women in India. That percentage may not give you a clear idea. Look at the actual figure: 59853 registered crimes against women. That is an astounding figure of 164 per day. Every ten minutes a woman is attacked in that state. That is by the records. Unofficially the number is much higher. Not even half the cases are registered in that state where the police are greater criminals than the goons who sell their services rather too cheap. If a woman goes to complain, she will end up being gangraped in the police station!

We shouldn’t blame the UP Police unjustly, however. They will arrest you if you say anything against their leader, the yogi. Quite many journalists are languishing in UP prisons for speaking out truths that are unpalatable to the yogi. The police are so loyal to their state, so nationalistic in fact, that even journalists on their way to a crime scene may be arrested. One of my compatriots, Siddique Kappen from the Malayalam periodical Azhimukham, was arrested from Mathura while he was on his way to report the Hathras rape case. No one knows what his crime was. But in UP you don’t ask such questions.

The yogi decides your destiny there. He is a criminal himself. But when he became the chief minister he wrote off all those cases. As simple as that. He just put his own signature to an order he promulgated himself. And voila! He became a saint. You see how simple things are in Yogi’s UP.

Yogi doesn’t think much of women. He is a yogi, after all, and not a bhogi like most of us ordinary mortals. He declared once that women are like energy and if they are not controlled they can be destructive and worthless, and may even be rakshasas (demons).

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It is not women alone that the yogi hates. He hates almost everybody. Perhaps that hate is what his religion means. It’s probably the ascetic detachment that yogis are supposed to practise. He hates the non-Hindus. He hated even Mother Teresa whom he accused of converting his Hindus into Christians. You may wonder where all those Christians converted by Mother Teresa are. But then in yogi’s UP you don’t ask questions. Remember your worth is just 55,000 Indian bucks. A semi-literate politician in UP will get a better sum as monthly pension after holding office for a few months.

Yogi’s hatred of Muslims is too well-known for any mention here. Who can forget the incendiary speech he gave in Gorakhpur where a fight took place between Hindus and Muslims during a Muharram procession. Yogi gave that speech violating the curfew. Such bravery can only come from extraordinary asceticism.

In 2011, yogi asked Hindu men to “dig up the graves of Muslim women and rape the corpses.” Such acts will require more than any ordinary degrees of asceticism. In 2015, yogi declared that “if they (the Muslims) kill one Hindu, we will kill 100 of them.”

Well, when you have that sort of a man ruling a state, you know that even 55,000 can be too big a price for a human being.