The way of the sword and the monk's cowl: How the BJP's Yogi Adityanath hopes to use religious polarisation to trump caste fragmentation in the battle for Uttar Pradesh

"...Recent reports describe Adityanath - a Hindutva hardliner, and prime accused in Gorakhpur's 2007 communal riots - as a key coordinator of the BJP's election strategy for Uttar Pradesh, the state with the most Lok Sabha seats. He first won the Gorakhpur seat when 26-years-old; now 42, he has fashioned himself as the BJP's most recognised face in east Uttar Pradesh... In 1999, Yogi Adityanath won Gorakhpur by the slimmest of margins - 7,339 votes; 10 years later in 2009, he romped home with a winning margin of 2,20,000 votes. This year, locals are speculating on the winning margin, rather than the possibility of his victory, despite no particular signs of progress in this constituency... Over 15 years, Adityanath, an upper caste Kshatriya, has sunk deep roots in Gorakhpur. His clerks resolve squabbles in city neighbourhoods; his foot soldiers from the Hindu Yuva Vahini have been criticised for engineering riots in the countryside. His inflammatory anti-Muslim rhetoric has polarised eastern Uttar Pradesh, while his position as the mahant of the Gorakhnath temple lends his pronouncements an air of mystical profundity...

This election season, the BJP has publicly focused on the need for good governance and development and steered clear of overt communal and regional propaganda but on the ground, Modi is banking on regional satraps like Adityanath to bring in the votes at all costs... Adityanath's biggest asset, his critics said, is an amorphous vigilante army of youth organised as the Hindu Yuva Vahini and tasked with protecting the Hindu faith. In 1999, Yogi Adityanath made front-page news as an MP. "BJP out to protect trigger-happy MP" ran the second lead on the March 6 Lucknow edition of The Times of India, detailing an extraordinary story that began as a minor dispute over the fate of a peepul tree in a Muslim graveyard in a faraway village, acquired increasingly communal overtones, and ended with Adityanath desecrating the graveyard and his supporters fatally shooting a 26-year-old policeman in the face. "A pattern emerged," said Manoj Singh, a senior journalist in Gorakhpur, "Yogiji or his supporters would interfere in a village-level fight between two communities and turn it into a big case of Hinduism under threat."...'