Will Yogi Adityanath be able to make a difference for BJP in poll-bound states?
Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath continues to remain Bharatiya Janata Party’s star campaigner in at least three of the five poll-bound states.
That clearly shows how desperately the party is banking on its politics of polarisation, which is perhaps the USP of the saffron-clad chief minister of India’s most populous state.
It is strange that the party leadership entrusted Yogi with the responsibility even though experiences in several states over the nearly past 12 months show that the UP chief minister failed to make any considerable difference to the BJP tally.
And to top it all, BJP lost even the Gorakhpur Lok Sabha seat, which was considered a Yogi bastion since he had won from the constituency five successive times.
Be it Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Uttarakhand or the Northeast states where Assembly elections were held over the past one year, Yogi Adityanath was among the key star campaigners, but he could hardly mobilise any additional vote for the BJP.
Even though the party managed to romp home in most of these states, the UP chief minister had no role to play in it. In fact, he failed to even pull large crowds in Gujarat, Himachal and even Uttarakhand.
Yet, the party leadership decided to handpick him for the crucial elections in the three states of Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, where BJP is faced with a stiff wave of anti-incumbency. BJP insiders suspect that Yogi was not the popular choice of the party, but the RSS and other hardcore Hindutva forces were hell-bent on using him as the polarising figure.
The fact remains that barring Chhattisgarh, where chief minister Raman Singh is credited with a lot of visible development, BJP has very little work to showcase in the other two states.
While there is much disillusionment with the style of working of Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje Scindia, who has failed to deliver, Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s popularity is on the wane due to multiple reasons.
Under the circumstances, Yogi Adityanath is expected to come in handy to take the attention of the people away from real issues into the realm of Hindutva.
Failing to fulfil the party’s promise on Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, the large-scale name-changing exercise, currently being undertaken by Adityanath in Uttar Pradesh, is being seen as the first step in the direction of polarisation.
No wonder, both cities — Allahabad and Faizabad were chosen for name change. Without caring to understand the essence of the names Allahabad and Faizabad, the UP chief minister chose to rename them as Prayagraj and Ayodhya.
The fact is that neither Allahabad founder Akbar, nor Awadh nawab Saadat Ali Khan, who built Faizabad, ever attempted to alter the original names of Prayag or Ayodhya. Both Allahabad and Faizabad were new cities built in the neighbourhood of what were popular Hindu pilgrimage centres, which remained as they were.
However, the impression that Yogi and his supporters are trying to build is that he is only undoing the ‘Islamisation’ of names by Muslim rulers.
Not very long ago, Yogi had also changed the name of Mughalsarai junction to Deen Dayal Upadhaya junction. And even before he entered the coveted office of chief minister, he went on a renaming spree of localities in his home bastion, Gorakhpur. He renamed Humayunpur as Hanumanpur and Miya Bazar as Maya Bazar.
It is widely believed that his next target is Lucknow, which is likely to be rechristened as Lakshmanpuri.
He was also busy working on his plans to install an imposing statue of Lord Ram at a public place in Ayodhya.
“The deity for offering prayers will remain inside the Ram temple, while this large sized statue of Lord Ram would be installed for viewing,” he declared in Ayodhya on Choti Diwali, which he observed on the banks of the Saryu river in Ayodhya by lighting three lakh ‘diyas’.
He did so for the second consecutive year largely with the intent to keep all Ram devotees in good humour. Once again he sought to add a dash of melodrama to the mega show by getting some artists to enact the arrival of Ram, Sita and Lakhsman from their 14-year-long exile on a helicopter, symbolic of the mythical ‘pushpak viman’ that flew them down all the way from Lanka.
It is said that the hype being created by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) in the name of the Ram temple through a rally proposed to be held in Ayodhya on November 25, also has the blessings of Yogi Adityanath.
Evidently, Yogi hopes to turn the fate of his party in states like Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh through the narration of the events which he considers as his prime ‘achievements’.
Will these moves find resonance among the masses in the poll-bound states, or all his desperate efforts to establish himself as a star campaigner go in vain like the past, remains a million dollar question.