Yogi and Politician

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