PM’s praise of Yogi: UP safest state for women?

Political leaders and parties rarely consult their conscience or notions of common morality in their electoral fever. They don’t wink an eye in trotting out fiction for facts, cynically confirming that campaigns have ceased to be means of political education, and instead, degenerated into mere scapegoating of sections of society and denigrating opposition parties.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah did precisely this while kicking off UP Assembly election campaign recently. Earlier this year in West Bengal, election campaign was trivialised by top BJP leaders with personalised, undignified references to TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee with no holds barred comments. It appeared as if winning West Bengal was an issue of life and death. In UP, Modi paid exaggerated, if undeserved, compliments to Yogi, of all the things, on law and order, and Covid management.

“Today there is rule of law in UP. Parents used to live in fear and uncertainty about the safety of their daughters. This has changed since 2017”. This testimony by Modi was barely a few months after the terrible Hathras gangrape in September 2020. The Unnao rape was perpetrated in 2017; the victim was raped, thrashed, stabbed and finally burnt alive. Her testimony that BJP MLA Sengar had raped her, was accepted by the Court although all evidence was sought to be destroyed. The MLA was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Modi’s glowing tribute was that everything was hunky-dory in UP after 2017. But in 2018, the UP government had conceded that “law and order situation is now not good”. It went on to claim, without revealing any statistics, in 2020: “it has improved appreciably”. Contrary to declarations made by Modi and Shah, the state had the dubious distinction of topping the list in crimes against women. Every sixth case of crime against women in India happens in UP; The NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau) reports that – in comparison to 2018, crimes against women have increased significantly in UP (12 women raped daily in UP) and in India as well. It also reveals: “there is no such state in India where women and girls are safe”. However, as on June 15, 2021, Mumbai has been ranked one of the safest cities for working women, followed by Bengaluru, Pune, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad and a few other cities. Not a single city of UP figures in the list.

In absolute numbers of violent crimes in India, UP reported the highest incidents of 65,155 out of 4,28,134 cases, accounting for 15.2% of all violent crimes. Six cases of crime against women are reported every hour in the state. Between 2016 and 2019, the National Human Rights Commission registered over 2,000 cases of hate crimes involving minorities, including incidents of lynching (of which UP accounted for 870 cases as reported in February 2020). The semi-feudal caste hierarchy in the state has also resulted in ‘maximum atrocities against Dalits’.

Holy Book

Conscientious digital platforms, committed NGOs and courageous individuals have asserted their constitutional freedom to criticise the repression by the government, its suppression of crime statistics and the absence of rule of law. A group of 83 eminent former civil servants – including diplomats – has spoken out as many as eight times from middle of 2017 to end of 2018 on the “rapid erosion of Constitutional values…and a deliberate attempt to display majoritarian muscle and send the message to the Muslim community … to accept their subordinate status”. They were also critical of the Prime Minister: “Our Prime Minister who is so voluble in his election campaigns and who never tires of telling us how the Constitution of India is the only Holy Book he worships, maintains stony silence even as he sees a chief minister, handpicked by him, treats that same Constitution with sheer contempt.”

Propaganda plays on existing beliefs of voters. Perhaps, that’s why the top leaders indulged in extravagant distortion of the ugly law and order at the ground level in UP as well as Yogi government’s mishandling of the pandemic. Such distortion was clearly meant to address the existing beliefs of the people and seek to re-shape them if they were unfavourable to the government. By spouting select figures in wily campaigns through powerful rhetoric, he touches the emotions of the people. Modi had rightly sensed that the people of the state were tired of the violence, extra-judicial killings and a sense of insecurity-- all unleashed by a partisan government and that the people were looking for a change.

Yogi Adityanath had himself said that the police had been directed ‘to shoot to kill’ the goondas. In December 2019, UP police had proudly announced that they had killed 103 ‘criminals’ and injured some 2,000 in encounters or extra-judicial killings. Police, it appears, had a free hand in labelling people as ‘criminals’. The UP government had put up posters of people who, allegedly, “participated in violence during anti-CAA protests” until it was ordered by the High Court to take them down.

Finally, coming to ‘Covid management’, a significant statement by senior officers of the Ministry of Health on July 11, 2021 (three days prior to the PM’s compliments to Adityanath) declared UP as “a state of concern”. “Despite Centre’s advisory, big crowds continue to congregate in districts...People due for the second dose are not coming forward”, the officer said. UP government had claimed that it had satisfactorily handled the second wave of Covid. It claimed that 12 districts had reported zero cases and 52 districts had reported cases in single digits. But the Civil Registration System had a different story to tell. In 24 districts, 1.97 lakh deaths took place between July 2020 and March 2021--number of deaths 43 times higher than the official figures. Perhaps, that is why the then Union Labour Minister Santosh Gangawar and some BJP MLAs were provoked to publicly contradict the government’s figures and point their fingers at the bodies floating in the Ganga.

(The writer is a Congress leader and former Chairman, Karnataka Legislative Council)