Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath is following the path undertaken by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his days as chief minister of Gujarat. After establishing himself as a Hindu Hyridaya Samrat, the emperor of Hindu hearts, in the aftermath of the infamous 2002 Gujarat riots, Modi cast himself as a 'vikas purush', marketing what he took to describe as the 'Gujarat model'.
Saffron-clad monk-turned-politician, Adityanath, too, is now out to impress upon the people that he might be seen as a living embodiment of Hindutva. Still, he is as much on a 'development' mission. To top it, he has begun to market his own 'UP model' of development on the lines of the 'Gujarat model'. But unlike Modi, who could showcase the visible industrial growth in his home state, Adityanath has very little he can boast about.
In his first stint (2017 to 2022), Adityanath undertook the construction of five expressways simultaneously, but not one of these could be completed in the first four years, in contrast to his predecessor Akhilesh Yadav who built one 300-km Lucknow-Agra expressway in a record 24 months.
Eventually, when two of Adityanath's expressways were hastily put up for inauguration by Prime Minister Modi, their quality proved far inferior to what rival Akhilesh Yadav had done. Both these expressways caved in at a few places days after the inauguration by the PM, for whom it became a huge embarrassment.
But Adityanath remained unstoppable. He made tall claims about transforming UP in the same manner as Modi had claimed to have given Gujarat a make-over during his second chief ministerial tenure between 2005 and 2010.
With his tirade against certain select criminals, Adityanath continues to find it convenient to emphasise mainly his claims about having improved UP's law and order. He focuses on projecting himself as an iron man who crushed all criminals with an iron hand. Bulldozer has become his insignia, and it is often seen pulling down buildings allegedly constructed unauthorisedly by mafia dons and their cohorts in different parts of the state. And by doing so, he seeks to attract investments in the state, which has a poor track record of industrial or economic growth over the decades, primarily because of rampant crime.
It is another matter that most of such criminals on the administration's target are Muslims - as if to convey that they alone violate the law. What is skilfully concealed is that similar violations committed by those belonging to other religions are glaringly ignored or overlooked. In the bargain, the political message systematically sent far and wide is that if anyone has put members of this minority community in their place, it is the Yogi. Sure enough, that serves the party's underlying purpose of polarising Hindu votes in this subtle manner.
Significantly, even those booked under stringent criminal laws like the Gangsters Act, Goonda Act or National Security Act are primarily members of the Muslim minority community. Although those on target are undisputedly notorious outlaws, the impression that goes is that crimes are committed only by members of one particular community. The most infamous among them are dreaded mafia dons Mukhtar Ansari, Atiq Ahmed, and their close and distant relatives or supporters. The only politician on the government's target also happened to be none other than Samajwadi Party co-founder Azam Khan who had as many as 82 criminal cases slapped on him by the Adityanath administration and for which he was incarcerated behind bars for 27 long months before he got bail from the Supreme Court. The government does not tire of repeating these names with such regularity that the intention becomes vivid and clear.
Adityanath detailed special scouting teams under different ministers to various parts of the globe to showcase UP's potential for investment to bolster his claims about 'development' being high on his agenda. Eight high-level teams led by individual ministers have just returned from different parts of the globe to announce that they have managed to get MOUs worth Rs 7.12 lakh crore signed by prospective foreign investors, who are expected to converge here in February 2023, when Lucknow will host a grand Global Investment Summit (GIS), which is being planned as an unprecedented mega event by Adityanath.
This was not the first time that an Investment summit was organised by the UP chief minister. The last such show was held barely a year after Adityanath assumed office. The last one, in February 2018, was presided over by none other than Prime Minister Modi. MOUs worth Rs. 4.68 lakh crore were signed. However, eventually, when the ground-breaking ceremony followed a year later, the UP government was hard-pressed to present the concretisation of more than 10 per cent of the MOUs.
As if all is forgotten about that summit, this new summit, 'global' this time in nomenclature, is now underway with even louder propaganda systematically projected in the mainstream media through paid advertorials, sponsored news items and advertisements. However, even before this could see the light of day, the chinks had already become visible. And the most glaring is an MOU signed with a so-called university based in the US to set up a giant Knowledge Centre with an estimated investment of $4 billion. Former UP minister Siddharth Nath Singh who accompanied UP's finance minister Suresh Khanna to the US and Canada on this trip, returned to announce that his team had signed MOUs worth Rs 4.07 lakh crore.
The Adityanath government cut a sorry figure when a leading national daily exposed that the university, supposedly run by an Egyptian-American, was fake and that the US authorities had already slapped a fine of $ 2500 for misrepresentation of its status. The expose naturally puts a big question mark on the veracity of the other multiple MOUs. No wonder that critics have begun to accuse the UP government of selling dreams and putting up a façade of a UP model in the hope that Yogi Adityanath would be able to build an iconic profile like that of Narendra Modi when he marched down from Ahmedabad to New Delhi's portals of power in 2014.
(Sharat Pradhan is a Lucknow-based journalist and author)
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.