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Whenever I see Yogi Adityanath’s
pictures, I am reminded of oxymoron. A despotic ascetic, ruthless sage,
religious criminal… He is a long list of oxymorons, in fact.
The BBC recently
described him as “India’s most divisive and abusive politician who often
uses his election rallies to whip up anti-Muslim hysteria.” Hatred drives this
yogi. That is rather funny if you are an irreligious person like me. For
religious people, especially for those who believe in this Yogi’s kind of
religion, that description may sound spiritual or jihadist.
What I find
funny about this man is that he is a despicable criminal but revered by a few
million people merely because he wears a particular dress and speaks a
particular language. Anywhere else, he would have been confined to a prison.
But in the heart of India, he is a saintly yogi. Eugene Ionesco would have
written his best play had he met Yogi Adityanath.
If asceticism
is about renunciation, this Yogi has nothing to do with it. He is attached to
too many things including political power. Asceticism is about the most refined
virtues of humans such as compassion, truthfulness, self-restraint, and so on.
Our Yogi is just the opposite of all that. He is brutal, fraudulent and egotistic.
One of the
first things that Yogi Adityanath did after becoming Chief Minister of his
state was to withdraw all the cases against himself. He declared himself
innocent without even taking the trouble of washing away the sins with a ritual
dip in the Ganga. The people of his state applauded when he ratified his
innocence with a chief-ministerial order. And then they went on to kill certain
people. Jaisa raja, waisi praja, someone justified. The BBC went on to report
that under Yogi’s five-year rule, “lynchings and hate speech against Muslims
routinely made headlines.” Muslims were persecuted in every imaginable way by
this yogi. He should have been a pope in the medieval period.
In May 2021, BBC reported
that Yogi’s holiest river was swollen with dead bodies of people who died of
Covid-19. At the same time, Yogi was putting out advertisements in all newspapers
of the country (including my own Malayalam ones!) to show that his state was nothing
less than a utopia. “No one can beat the BJP in propaganda,” the BBC wrote. “The
party spent 6.5bn rupees [$85m; £65m] on publicizing Mr Adityanath’s achievements
even though lots of projects remain on paper…”
The report
goes on to quote someone: “Hindutva is his major selling point. For his diehard
supporters, it’s not important what Yogi Adityanath does for them, but what he
does against Muslims…”
In the end, all
that yoginess boils down to that: hatred of Muslims.
Today I sit
at home instead of teaching in a classroom as I usually do because the Muslims
of Kerala are holding a hartal in the state to protest against the countrywide raids
and arrests of many Muslims. What have we done to India’s social fabric, I
wonder. Who is a genuine Indian today? That question is as good as asking who
is a genuine yogi in UP.
PS.
Written for Indispire Edition 421: Is a yogi wielding political
power like a vulture preaching nonviolence from a pulpit? #YogiPolitics
Hari OM
ReplyDeleteHe is an abomination against the saffron robes... YAM xx
Indeed. It'd be good of him to disrobe himself and don the usual politician's garb.
DeleteThe more I read about the politics in the country, more annoyed I get
ReplyDeleteWe live in post-truth world. Fair is foul and vice versa.
Delete