Just 5 feet and 4 inches tall, Yogi Adityanath has carried on his shoulders the dreams of millions and the aspirations of the world’s oldest civilization. Five years after the BJP won a thumping majority in the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections and selected him to lead the country’s most populous state, the saffron-clad Mahant of Gorakhnath has demonstrated that his trajectory is neither a flash in the pan nor a product of circumstances. The big story of the 2022 assembly elections is that Yogi is here to stay. With successive election cycles reinforcing a political phenomenon that was believed to be a single-time event, we now have an additional and important fixture in the nation’s political consciousness.
The significance of Yogi’s re-election is hard to overplay. Not a single Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh who completed their full term was ever re-elected for a consecutive term, underlying how rough the state’s political terrain and how unforgiving the state’s electorate is. The BJP’s victory in Uttar Pradesh, therefore, bears important takeaways for both Yogi and national politics at large.
Yogi Adityanath as the foremost defender of Indian civilization and the administrator par excellence, are themes that have emerged repeatedly in the last five years. Upholding these themes however is one that has generally been missed or remained invisible until today – that of Yogi Adityanath as the politician. Of course, a five-term Member of Parliament, a Chief Minister who has deftly handled multiple crises mostly emanating from negative publicity campaigns and a leader who took on the SP-BSP mahagathbandhan in 2019 only to deliver 63 seats to his party’s tally at the center, never needed to prove his political credentials. However, the 2017 assembly elections were neither fought using his name, nor were they fought under his leadership. Yogi Adityanath was handpicked by the party with the hope that he would do justice to the massive mandate they had received. Today the party’s choice has paid off. No doubt the Modi wave and the party’s well-oiled machinery remain ever-present in Uttar Pradesh, but this result without a doubt is a popular mandate for Yogi Adityanath.
The political significance of Yogi’s role though, despite being historic, remains incomplete unless the specific circumstances of this election are accounted for. Seven years after Narendra Modi stormed to power at the center and the BJP replaced the Congress Party as the dominant force in Indian politics, the party faced its worst political crisis since 2014. Just as India was recovering from the first wave of Covid-19 and the devastating lockdowns that had ensued, it was hit by a second and much more potent wave of the once-in-a-century pandemic. As the country grappled with millions gasping for breath, opponents of all hues descended on the hospitals and the crematoriums, and successfully cast a shadow of gloom and doom upon the country. Lengthy agitations orchestrated by them along the highways around the national capital further attempted to bring the Modi dispensation to its knees. Having lost the narrative, the BJP ended up losing the West Bengal elections of 2021, arguably the most important state election in years and an election that was the BJP’s to lose. It seemed as if the BJP’s upward trajectory had finally run its course, and the party was losing the plot. If 2021 was not enough to derail the BJP, nothing in a long time would.
Less than a year later, the party has returned to power in Uttar Pradesh in a first-of-its-kind historic re-election. Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s famous dictum about the road to Delhi passing through Lucknow, an essential feature of BJP’s national victories in both 2014 and 2019, will be remembered today. With the opposition continuing to be divided and depleted across the country, the BJP’s path to Delhi for a third consecutive term seems to be clearing up again. A complete reversal of BJP’s fortunes at a national level in less than a year, and that too through the watershed results of a state election, is Yogi Adityanath’s political value.
The 2014 general elections, the 2017 state elections, the 2019 general elections and now the 2022 state elections indicate that the BJP has successfully made of Uttar Pradesh the laboratory that it made of Gujarat in the Modi era – a model of development backed up by complete ideological dominance that reaps political dividend relentlessly. In Gujarat, the BJP had to systematically wipe out the Congress Party which had ruled for decades, and work on further improving a relatively developed state. To achieve this level of dominance in Uttar Pradesh however, both at a political and administrative level, was a much taller task. With the state contributing eighty seats in the Lok Sabha, and with its proportion of seats likely to rise in the case of a delimitation in 2026, the importance and necessity of Yogi Adityanath for the BJP in national politics will only grow. The credibility of Yogi’s UP model after these elections sets it up to be Narendra Modi’s Gujarat model of the future on the national stage. A crime-free, business-friendly, infrastructurally developed and civilisationally conscious Uttar Pradesh will be the biggest turnaround story of Indian politics for decades.
With the advent of Narendra Modi on the national stage in 2014, many had expected the five-term Member of Parliament from Gorakhpur with massive clout in eastern Uttar Pradesh to find a place in his council of ministers. A certain class of Indians who had dominated the mainstream discourse up until 2014 would have been happy not to see him there, since the presence of an outspoken saffron-clad Mahant in the cabinet, a fringe element in their dictionary, would have made them uncomfortable. But Narendra Modi is, after all, the man who brought the Congress Party down, arguably making him the savviest politician in India’s history. Ironically, unlike what this class of people believed, Yogi’s exclusion from the cabinet or any other important responsibility was not to cater to their liberal sensitivities. In fact, Yogi was being held back for a role that would bring him to the centrestage of national politics. Today, this story has progressed to the part where we are quite likely to see a saffron-clad Prime Minister in our lifetimes.
Ajit Datta is an author and political commentator. He has authored the book, ‘Himanta Biswa Sarma: From Boy Wonder to CM’. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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