By coincidence I travelled to Uttar Pradesh two days before the UP Police shot dead two young men in a field near Jhansi last week. The ‘encounter’ was part of Yogi Adityanath’s stated intent to liquidate all gangsters. And what does this have to do with my own wanderings in Yogi land? I shall explain. I returned to a town called Kosi Kalan that I last visited five years ago. It is a grim, dismal, filthy town with a large Muslim population. When I describe the conditions in which people live you might understand why this state breeds so many criminals and gangsters.
When I came to Kosi Kalan five years ago what disgusted me was that when I entered this town the first thing that I saw were fields and fields of rotting garbage on both sides. This has not changed. If anything, these garbage fields have now spilled their filth into the town, so I saw schoolchildren in white uniforms cycle to school through a landscape of garbage. In the main bazaar I saw people eat in restaurants, pray in temples, and run their businesses amid clogged drains and stinking garbage.
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Among the people I met that morning was a Hindu man who saw Yogi as a hero for killing off the ‘mafia’. When I asked why he was not disturbed by the filth in which he lived he said Yogi’s priority is establishing law and order and he will deal with other things afterwards. To stand that idea on its head may I say that no child who grows up in dirty, degraded, ugly towns can end up becoming a model citizen.
The first people I met in Kosi Kalan were a group of Muslim men. They were eating breakfast on the edge of a drain solid with green slime, in a restaurant that buzzed with so many flies I found it hard to take notes. The Muslims I talked to said that the squalor in which they lived was forced upon them by municipal officials who only cleaned in Hindu areas. The man who spoke for the group said, “Since Yogi became chief minister, Muslims have been treated like dirt. You see only the filth in which we live but we also deal with our means of livelihood being destroyed. We breed animals. Because of this we are targets of the Bajrang Dal. They take our young boys away, beat them, extort money, and confiscate our animals.”
On this trip I saw government schools that were in an advanced state of decay as if empty and abandoned. If urban schools are bad, rural ones are worse. It is no surprise to come across villages in which there are twice as many private schools as government schools because people would rather pay for their children to get an education than let them pretend to be studying in a government school.
None of this is new. This is how it has always been in poorer states and Uttar Pradesh is among our poorest states. But it is because Yogi’s publicity blitzkrieg has convinced a lot of people that he has brought melodramatic change that it surprised me to find everything as it has always been. The difference that I saw was more tensions between Hindus and Muslims than before and more sense that if you are Hindu and upper caste then this is your time. I did not meet Dalits on this trip, but I heard from a BJP rural leader that their village was in a state of decline since an ‘SC pradhan’ took charge because it fell into a reserved category. “All he does is drink and lie around all day. He does no work,” the BJP man said.
What saddened me was that when I posted pictures on Twitter from my wanderings, I was charged with deliberately finding ‘some obscure place’ to defame Yogi. Among the people who joined in the virulent attack on me were those ‘proud to be followed by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah’. This attack on me in the digital public square that is Twitter became more vicious when I said that the police should avoid killing people in ‘encounters’ because this is a violation of the rule of law. Criminals deserve to be shot was the chorus that came my way.
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Let me end this gloomy piece on a happy note. If Yogi’s followers believed I was deliberately trying to defame him, his officials certainly did not. By the evening of my travels the Swachch Bharat cell of the UP government had cleaned up the bazaar in Kosi Kalan and made it a point to tweet pictures of their good work tagging me to ensure I saw them. This is something that I have never seen happen before, so I admit that there may be sides to Yogi Raj that I have not fully examined.
To those who have abused me for highlighting Kosi Kalan’s squalor on the grounds that urbanisation has similar problems all over the world, I want to say that you are wrong. I have seen countries poorer than India that are clean. To those who said that it was because of Muslims that Kosi Kalan is awash with garbage I want to say that not only are you racist, but you have clearly never been to Muslim countries. And shame on you for your racist tweets.