Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has never had it so bad. Not even when he faced the wrath of the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protesters and civil rights activists for ruthless crackdown or the outrage over the gunning down of gangster Vikas Dubey by questionable police methods.
The fast turn of events since the death of a Valmiki Dalit girl at Hathras, which is less than 200 km from Delhi, has left him politically beleaguered, though he still enjoys the full support of the top Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders.
A leader with a cultivated image of a fast-decision-maker and a tough administrator, Adityanath feels hamstrung by the way he was let down by a system he heads.
The handling of the alleged rape and murder of the teenage girl by suspected upper caste Rajput/Thakur men in the maize fields of Hathras, followed by a rather insensitive and hasty cremation of her body by the district officials and police in the dark hours has brought out the brutal side to the UP administration.
No amount of explanation by the state administration, including the plea that they tried to thwart backlash spearheaded by militant Dalit groups, has convinced the intelligentsia.
Around the same time, another incident of rape and murder of another Dalit woman in UP’s Balrampur district where the perpetrators, unlike in Hathras, allegedly belong to a minority community, has not earned a similar outrage.
Sensing a big opportunity to chip away the BJP’s sway among the weaker sections, Congress leaders Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi (who has taken up the task of reviving their party ahead of the 2021 assembly polls) showed that they braved police canes to literally embrace the family of the victim.
Adding ammunition to the Congress campaign, which has riled Adityanath, is the Bhim Army, a Dalit group led by Chandrashekhar Azad Ravan, has been very quick to seize the situation right since the Hathras girl succumbed to her wounds at Safardarjung Hospital in Delhi on September 29. Ravan was also active along with Muslim groups spearheading anti-CAA protests in Delhi.
For Adityanath, who is a loner at the top since he was chosen Chief Minister over other claimants after BJP’s stunning victory in the 2017 polls, the events have fuelled massive fears of a plan to unsettle his government by inciting caste and communal differences.
Disregarding the outrage across India over the plight of the Dalit girl, Adityanath has ordered filing of 21 cases of conspiracy across UP. No matter how farfetched it may seem now, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has come to the Chief Minister’s aid by claiming that Rs 100 crore was sent to UP to trigger big-scale trouble under the banner of ‘Justice for Hathras’ on the model of Black Lives Matter campaign in the United States.
The family of the Hathras victim too have come under scrutiny by the Adityanath administration for apparently changing statements relating to the narration of events leading to the assault on the girl at the behest of opposition leaders.
Call Detail Records (CDRs) of the victim and her brother with the accused have been released to the media to buttress the police case that there is more to it than what has been stated by them. The police are also looking into the angle of honour killing by a family member and the blame fixed on one of the accused who was said to be known to the girl. The case could undergo a major shift in the focus if the police make headway in this direction.
A petition too has been filed in the high court, on behalf of the family members, alleging their ‘illegal confinement’ and being framed to save the perpetrators.
At the risk of being seen as vindictive towards the Opposition, the state administration has booked former All India Congress Committee secretary Shyoraj Jivan Valmiki, who was caught on camera talking of staging caste riots in Hathras and other parts of UP, and also seeking to influence the victim’s family.
Of course, in his eagerness to show that he won’t spare any of the accused in the crime, the Adityanath government has itself urged the Supreme Court (in response to a petition for an independent inquiry into the girl’s death) to supervise a CBI probe to insulate the investigation from any extraneous pressure.
However, the CM’s responses thus far seemed to show that he has given greater priority to unearth the ‘conspiracies’ against his government rather than tackle the systemic deficiencies — that has often led to poor policing attitude and investigation of widely occurring caste violence, particularly sexual assaults on Dalit women by entrenched upper caste men.
Adityanath has reasons to feel that he has been put in the dock — not just because what his lower rank officials did or did not do, but also because he belongs to the Thakur community, the same as the accused in this case.
His political opponents constantly rub in this angle.
That’s why it is all the more imperative that Adityanath tackles the issues of incompetence and impaired justice system in UP, which won’t prevent a repeat of Hathras or Balrampur. A special investigation team (SIT), which is going through the entire episode (in addition to the CBI probe), may or may not dwell on the broken rural administrative and police system.
By over focusing on the ‘international conspiracies’, Adityanath invites a larger risk of not just global ridicule but failing to use an opportunity to reform the system from within with correctives — if he wishes to be remembered as an able deliverer of social and economic welfare. Good politics also means good, responsive and responsible administration.
Shekhar Iyer is former senior associate editor of Hindustan Times and political editor of Deccan Herald. Views are personal.
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