We Survived 8 Years Of Adityanath

Let’s keep two minutes silence for those we lost along the way

Looks like Indian Express forgot to check its own archives.

When the first wave of Covid-19 ended in 2020, a small business began selling a simple fridge magnet that proudly announced: We Survived 2020! It’s still on my fridge, now a mockery of those I lost in 2021, during the second wave of the pandemic.

I was reminded of the Covid magnet when I saw Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s piece in today’s Indian Express titled ‘Making of Viksit UP’, about completing eight years in office. “This milestone is just the beginning,” Adityanath says. Unlike many, we survived.

Looks like the newspaper that prides itself on its ground reporting and journalism awards forgot to check its own archives.

Those who voted Adityanath back to power in the 2022 UP state elections did so despite the foul olfactory memory of burning flesh across the state’s overcrowded crematoria that worked non-stop to keep pace with the Covid body count. They ignored what they had seen just months before—the dead floating in the Ganges and lying like litter on its banks.

In Adityanath’s IE article there is no mention of the lives and freedoms sacrificed in this 8-year-ascent, not even when he’s patting himself on the back about the “organisation of the Mahakumbh”, where many citizens (the number is still unclear) died in a stampede or stampedes (the number is unclear). Families say they still haven’t received death certificates, which they need to claim compensation.

In his piece he cheers women and his efforts to empower them. But Adityanath is the epitome of TM, as my teenage daughter refers to toxic masculinity. A man who can’t bear to see young people in love—someone who doesn’t believe in a woman’s right to choose a partner. His anti-Romeo squads swoop down on couples in public spaces and he has spearheaded the movement to eradicate interfaith love and any other syncretic history this country may have once proudly displayed. In his words, “Women don’t need independence, they need protection.” If we get qualities of men, apparently we become ‘rakshasas’. When Kunal Kamra referred to Chhota Fanta in his comedy special Naya Bharat, everyone immediately knew who he was talking about.

Adityanath has no stomach for dissenters, especially if they are journalists and Muslims. In his first five years as CM, 66 journalists faced 138 criminal cases, 48 were attacked. UP, Kashmir and Chattisgarh are the most dangerous places to be a journalist in India—if you want to talk truth to power that is.

UP is more communally polarised than it has ever been. Adityanath’s Islamophobia is legendary—the fight “between 80% and 20%”; the ‘love jihad’ law; arbitrary demolitions of the houses of Muslims; extrajudicial killings, arresting and publicly humiliating anti-CAA protestors

A research report by Article 14 calculated that across India, 3,872 persons were charged with sedition in 26 cases related to the anti-CAA protests between 2017 and 2021. Uttar Pradesh accounted for the largest number of these cases.

“More than 1,000 citizens were charged with sedition by the Uttar Pradesh police after Yogi Adityanath took over as chief minister in 2017. UP also accounts for the most sedition cases for protesting the CAA—more than half of those accused of sedition since 2010 had protested the CAA. We found the accused were overwhelmingly Muslim, 90% of Muslim accused in sedition cases were charged after 2017, and in no other state has the sedition law been used so often against critics of the chief minister or government as it has in UP.”

You can read the piece here: Sedition & Uttar Pradesh

The famous “if they kill one, we will kill 100” line attributed to Adityanath was said as far back as 2007. In case you’ve forgotten, he has been a member of parliament since 1998. In another India, he actually used to come on television and allow himself to be interviewed by anchors such as Barkha Dutt on topics such as his Islamophobia, double standards and his theory of ‘love jihad’. Watch this video to remind yourself how tightly our freedoms have been clamped in the last decade and how our politicians’ relationship with journalists has changed.

https://www.ndtv.com/video/watch-yogi-adityanath-s-hindutva-rant-shadows-pm-s-development-chant-335939

Islamophobic slurs roll off his tongue with ease. Just a few weeks ago he had this to say: “They send their children to English medium schools but when the government wants to extend this opportunity to others' children, they (SP leaders) say 'teach them Urdu'... they want to make these children maulvis. They want to take the country toward kathmulla-pan.” After 8 years—and all that transpired before he first became CM—I have no energy left to even translate his slurs.

It’s actually been more than three times eight years. We’ve seen 27 years of Adityanath’s hateful approach to politics and people. Let’s keep two minutes silence for those we lost along the way.