By Aditya Aamir
How about this gentleman returning to tending cows and offering prayers and platitudes to his followers in Gorakhpur Mutt? Clothed in saffron does not make a good administrator. And doesn’t it strike everyone that it’s not a political outfit ruling Uttar Pradesh but a religious order shaming and shamming under the cover of the Constitution? Wherever we look in Uttar Pradesh there’s the colour of religion. Even when a police officer gets a bullet in his head, the blood is tainted saffron.
There is not much left to comment after that, is there? But there is. There is this question: When will UP be rid of a saffron head with hardly a hair to show? The answer to that is: Not unless the current dispensation ruling the Centre is booted out. Even, then, this cow will continue to head Uttar Pradesh. But he will be warned that one more cow-related antic and the new order in New Delhi would have all the reason to dismiss him. Will that happen? Only the EVM can tell!
That said, the Hindus have to contemplate, even if with empty heads, which most of them are. The glorification of the Hindu is so out of place when a picture of the Hindus painted by the likes of Yogi Adityanath looks so idiotic it makes idiots shake their heads in wonder! It can’t be anything else other than mass-idiocy which made people vote the BJP to power in Uttar Pradesh. There is no other explanation for the stupidity.
It shows that electoral democracy is not all that is made of it. People should have been warned the minute he set his khaki-clad Romeo Squads on necking heads in public parks and periodic ruins. That was a cheap shot. All the more because the only necking the Yogi has done is with cows! What does this chap know about love and how it takes hold of people of certain age? The backlash dispatched the Romeo squads underground but the bad taste remains.
Then, it came to notice that Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath doesn’t believe in the prison system and the notion that prisons are to reform-and-release, not bail-and-kill. His reign of police encounters of those with criminal records was utterly brutal, extra-judicial. Even perverse, because this is the man who once whimpered in Parliament that the UP Police was out to eliminate him in a fake encounter. Cowardice has a name and it starts with ‘Y’.
Somewhere along the incline, the extra-judicial killings stopped and there are now under-trials in UP jails who believe that they can secure bail and stay alive on the outside; so many of them had refused to get out even after getting bail till as long as encounters were the order of the day. It begs the question ‘Why?’ Someday, hopefully, there will be a judicial inquiry to lay to rest that ‘Y’. There are folks in UP missing their sons, however miserable those sons were. ‘Gunned Down in Sugarcane’ doesn’t make an epitaph!
But it makes sense that death has a bald head – the skull-and-crosses danger symbol. The Uttar Pradesh Assembly must have it etched on its front wall with warning ‘You could go down in a hail of bullets in a sugarcane field!’ If this is the Gujarat Model, it isn’t sweet to behold and definitely ain’t worth emulating. It seems the Yogi thought it was a legacy worth carrying forward with its weight in blood.
Also, in Yogi-raj, cows have it so much better than human beings, including having a dedicated ambulance service. Now, whatever happened to that? And the cows, they play such a big role in the Yogi’s head. Pictures of him fondling cows made headlines in so many UP dailies that one wondered if cows were the ones which got his government voted to power. At least, one thing was confirmed, a cow rules UP with a pair of bloody horns. Now, who was it said the devil has a pair of horns?
Forget live mooing cows, even cow carcasses can unleash cow vigilantism in Yogi-land. The other day Bulandshahr, that fountainhead of goondaism in western Uttar Pradesh saw dead cows run amok and an inspector who investigated the “fridge” got a brickbat and a bullet in his head. All because cow carcasses were found at the outskirts of a village. The slain cop’s sister spoke later: “All this man can think of is ‘Cow. Cow. Cow’”
Yep, that’s right. All that Yogi can think is ‘cow, cow and cow’. The day Hindus lose their cow-fixation there will be many an Indian citizen who will die in bed of old age. Iqlaq and Pehlu Khan and that young boy on the train, Junaid. They didn’t. Lives lynched because the world eats the cow and there are folks in Hindustan who worship cows let loose in the streets. Pictures of cows holding up traffic in Delhi and Mumbai don’t surprise the global citizen anymore.
And when the inspector got cow-killed where was the Yogi? He was in Hyderabad promising to change its name to ‘Bhagyanagar’ if the BJP is voted to power in Telangana. Of all the arrogance, and the impudence! Of all the names – Bhagyanagar! Lucky will be the day if Hyderabad escapes this epithet! And reports are that Yogi Adityanath returned to UP from a bout of rallying-the-Hindu in Rajasthan to watch a sound-&-light show in Gorakhpur.
What to say, except that the day the people of Uttar Pradesh see the light of day, there will be no light in their lives. To reiterate, anyone clothed in saffron doesn’t make a good administrator; especially, one who shaves his head, speaks intemperate language, not that of someone who holds a high constitutional office, and holds the lives of cows in higher relief than that of a fellow human being. ‘Gone Without a Trace’ will make a great epitaph. (IPA Service)