Harsh Mander: Impunity and immunity under Adityanath

The saffron-robed Ajay Singh Bisht, a five-time Bharatiya Janata Party MP from Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, has been the chief minister of India’s largest state since 2017. When he became a monk and then the mahant or head priest of the Gorakhnath Math, a Hindu temple in Gorakhpur, he had adopted the name Yogi Adityanath.

His Lok Sabha profile described him as a “religious missionary and social worker”. He founded and led a youth militia called the Hindu Yuva Vahini that is often alleged to have instigated and organised communal violence. He is one of the most polarising but also wildly popular hardline Hindutva leaders in the country.

Adityanath’s tenure has been marked by a sustained campaign to absolve all persons accused of hate speech and hate crimes – beginning with the chief minister himself.

Just months after being sworn as chief minister in March 2017, Adityanath announced in the state assembly that the state government would soon withdraw nearly 20,000 criminal cases lodged against politicians and political workers across parties. The move, he said, aimed to reduce the pendency of cases.

His government tabled The Uttar Pradesh Criminal Law (Composition of Offences and Abatement of Trials) (Amendment) Bill, 2017, in the state assembly to give effect to this announcement. Just a day earlier the state government had ordered the withdrawal of a criminal case against the chief minister related to a speech he made in Gorakhpur in 2007.

Social media exploded with memes. One declared, “Yogi spares Yogi.”

This is a brief overview of Adityanath’s rise to power and how he came to fashion a cloak of immunity for himself and his supporters.

Born on June 5, 1972, to a Thakur family in Masalgaon, a village in Uttarkashi district of what is now Uttarakhand, Ajay Bisht’s father was a forest ranger and mother a homemaker. He pursued a bachelor’s degree in science and became a member of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

Dhirendra Jha has written a fascinating account of Adityanath’s monastic and political life in The Caravan and Al Jazeera.

While studying for his masters, Bisht in 1992 encountered Mahant Avaidyanath at the Gorakhnath Mutt, Jha writes. The next year, Avaidyanath anointed him as a monk, named him Adityanath and declared him his heir.

Even before Adityanath, the Gorakhnath temple had a long tradition of engaging with extremist Hindutva politics. Avaidyanath’s predecessor and guru Digvijay Nath had joined the Hindu Mahasabha in 1937 when its president was VD Savarkar. Three days before Gandhi’s assassination, Digvijay Nath exhorted a crowd to kill the Mahatma. He was later jailed for nine months.

After Digvijay died in 1969, Avaidyanath took over as the mahant of the Gorakhnath temple. He became a prominent face in the Babri Masjid movement. In 1991, Avaidyanath was elected the MP for Gorakhpur under the banner of the BJP. He retained his seat in 1996.

After he died in 2014, the mantle of mahant fell on Adityanath.

But even before that, in 1998, Adityanath had won the first of five consecutive victories as MP for Gorakhpur, making him the youngest parliamentarian.

In the aftermath of the 2002 Gujarat carnage, he founded a militia called the Hindu Yuva Vahini or Vehicle for Hindu Youth. Three months after the Vahini was formed, a Hindu girl in Mohan Mundera, a Muslim-majority village about 48 km from Gorakhpur, was raped and murdered. Her family blamed a Muslim family’s servant. He was arrested for the crime.

Adityanath and his militia arrived at the village, where he made a provocative speech. This ignited violence. Forty seven Muslim houses were burnt. Within six months, Gorakhpur and its neighbouring districts saw at least six major communal riots and several smaller ones.

“Although it was registered as a cultural organisation, the HYV worked like a Hindu nationalist militia, trying to create a fear of minorities – especially Muslims – among the majority Hindus,” Dhirendra Jha noted in Al Jazeera. “Its preferred tactic was to frame every argument and altercation between a Hindu and Muslim in religious terms and turn it into a mini-sectarian riot.”

With the Hindu Yuva Vahini, Adityanath spearheaded an overtly communal anti-Muslim politics in Gorakhpur and neighbouring areas. Adityanath framed “every argument and altercation between a Hindu and a Muslim in religious terms”, Jha wrote . There were at least 22 communal riots between 2002-’07, which massively raised Adityanath’s political profile and popularity.

On January 27, 2007, after a Hindu boy was injured in a clash during a Muharram procession in Gorakhpur and later died, Adityanath violated prohibitory orders, to make an incendiary speech outside the railway station. It was caught on tape. “If the blood of one Hindu is spilled, then to avenge the murder of one Hindu, in the future we will not file FIRs with the administration but will get at least ten people murdered,” he said. “...If Hindu homes and shops are burnt then I do not think anyone can stop you from carrying out such acts…”

The cheering crowd broke out in rioting, killing two persons. Properties of Muslims worth crores of rupees were destroyed. However, the authorities foiled the plans of Adityanath and his followers to burn the Muharram tazias (tableaus). The monk and his men were arrested. He spent 11 days in jail.

This, Dhirendra Jha reports, was the first and only occasion when the administration acted strongly against Adityanath. The Uttar Pradesh government, led by Mulayam Singh Yadav, chose otherwise to treat him with kid gloves.

But the incarceration and the state government’s decision to withdraw his security guards seemed to have rattled Adityanath. In March, he famously wept on the floor of Parliament, declaring, “I have renounced my life for my society, I have left my family, I have left my mother and father, but I am being made a criminal.” His weeping dented his strongman image for a long time.

As the 2014 elections approached, his politics reacquired its older vitriol. For instance, in December 2013, he declared, “Muslims consider terrorists their protector. Hindus must unite and remain alert wherever Muslims live and confront them if the situation demands.”

After the BJP victory, the Hindu Yuva Vahini “kept the sectarian cauldron boiling by aggressively participating in a broader Hindu nationalist campaign against ‘love jihad’...[and] a campaign to forcibly convert Muslims to Hinduism”, Jha wrote.

In an undated video uploaded in August 2014, Adityanath said, “If [Muslims] take one Hindu girl, we’ll take 100 Muslim girls. If they kill one Hindu, we’ll kill 100 Muslims.” In 2015, he said that if he was given the chance, he would install idols of Hindu gods in every mosque.

In January 2015, Vahini men forced nearly 300 Muslims in Kushinagar district in eastern Uttar Pradesh to convert to Hinduism. The next month, they forced 82 Muslims of Bhibani village in Kushinagar to convert.

In 2017, the BJP-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh leadership made the surprising decision to install the monk as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh.

His past immediately caught up with him. A journalist named Parvez Parvaz who had witnessed the 2007 speech in Gorakhpur had earlier petitioned a local court seeking an investigation into Adityanath’s role in instigating the violence that had followed. The magistrate rejected the application on the grounds that a previous FIR existed.

However, the Allahabad High Court set aside the order, agreeing with Parvaz that the earlier FIR had related to a single incident of damage to a Muslim-owned shop, not the full range of violence and Adityanath’s role in it. After a tangled journey of the petition to the Supreme Court and back, the Allahabad High Court, just a day before the counting of votes to the Uttar Pradesh state assembly in 2017, asked the state government to report to it on the status of the 2007 case.

As a result, soon after Aditynath was sworn in as chief minister, a file landed on his table from the state police seeking sanction to prosecute the man who was headed the state’s executive branch. The accused in the case included Union Minister of State for Finance Shiv Pratap Shukla, BJP MLA Sheetal Pandey and 12 others.

The Allahabad High Court asked why the government had delayed granting sanction for so long and ordered the chief secretary to appear before it. The chief secretary, according to reports, said that forensic evidence suggests tapes of the speech had been tampered with. The Allahabad High Court closed the case and rejected Parvaz’s petition.

The paradox is that three years earlier, far from alleging that the tapes had been tampered with, Adityanath admitted (proudly) on national TV to making the speech.

In an episode of Aap ki Adalat, a show on India TV in August 2014, anchor Rajat Sharma asked him about the alleged hate speech, after showing him a video of it.

Rajat Sharma: Mahant ji, you are speaking in full flow. Wearing saffron robes, as a monk, is it right to make a hate speech?”

Adityanath: Look I had made a conditional statement. If a human hits you, then it is understandable that you will offer him the second cheek, but if a monster hits you, you should give it back. I am a monk. We have been trained with and without weapons. If I have a rosary in one hand, I wield a club in another, to induce the right conduct in society, and to punish the evil for their actions...”

Rajat Sharma: Modi ji talks of participation and development for all. You say, kill one, I will kill ten.”

Adityanath (with a smile); I have said if you kill one...it is natural...if you kill, don’t expect from us that you will be safe.”

Parvez Parwaz appealed against the rejection of his petition to the Supreme Court. But before the case could be heard, he was charged with rape. A district court in July, 2020 sentenced him to life imprisonment. Appeals against both orders are pending until the time of writing.

If there was any expectation his brief jailing and long legal battle connected with his 2007 Gorakhpur hate speech, and indeed the constitutional responsibilities of the high office of chief minister that he occupied would temper his public articulation of his extreme hate of India’s Muslims, Adityanath quickly put this to rest.

To illustrate this, I cite some dangerous speeches listed by the civil society group Citizens for Peace and Justice just two years into his first term as chief minister.

*“Create circumstances in India, that enable mobilisation of Hindus, that can tie the Hindus together, that can lead them to get their job done with aggression.”

* “If Congress and SP [Samajwadi Party], BSP [Bahujan Samaj Party] has faith in Ali, We also have faith in Bajrang Bali.”

*“Whoever lashes out at Hindutva will face the wrath of destructive forces there should be no doubt about this.”

*“We will not let the administration lodge an FIR, in fact we will make them kill at least 10 people who are involved in any kind of defiance.”

*We have pledged to ourselves if they take one Hindu girl then we will snatch at least 100 Muslim girls from them.

*“Hindu and Muslims are two separate cultures, these two cultures cannot co-exist, clash is bound to happen.”

The BBC reported his comment during the 2019-’20 protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh: “Men of a particular community, who are cowards, are sitting in their quilts and sending women and children out of their homes to protest against this law.”

He made this fiery speech in the Maharashtra election campaign in 2024:

“Whenever we are divided [meaning when Hindus do not unite to fight Muslims], there will be attacks on the Ganapati puja, in the name of land jihad and love jihad our properties and daughters will be threatened, there will be attempts to divide us. Now it is a fight to the finish.”

When tabling the Uttar Pradesh Criminal Law (Composition of Offences and Abatement of Trials) (Amendment) Bill, 2017, shortly after become chief minister, Adityanath told the House that 20,000 “politically motivated” and “non-serious” cases had been filed across the state over dharna and demonstrations and he believed it was time to withdraw them.

The law was passed the next day without any opposition.

Under the headline “Yogi govt to drop Yogi case”, the Telegraph reported that the Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav told reporters the decision had been taken “to give amnesty to the CM”. "But he did not explain why he or his party leaders failed to oppose the bill in the House,” the paper noted.

“The Uttar Pradesh home department has asked all 75 district magistrates in the state to initiate the process to withdraw over 20,000 ‘political cases’ registered against politicians till December 31, 2015, including one against chief minister Yogi Adityanath,” the paper reported

Jiby J Kattakayam in an opinion piece in The Times of India raised doubts about the legality of this statute. Section 321 of the Criminal Procedure Code does indeed grant the public prosecutor the leeway to withdraw from prosecution of offences with the consent of the court. But in another matter, the Allahabad High Court had held that the state government cannot exercise its authority under this section in a whimsical or arbitrary manner or for extraneous considerations.

Ultimately, Kattakayam affirmed, the discretion on which cases to proceed and which to quash must lie entirely with prosecutors and judges and not the executive.

Uttar Pradesh tops the country in number of under-trial prisoners with 55,000 prisoners or nearly one-fourth of all undertrial prisoners. Thirteen percent of cases in Uttar Pradesh have been pending for over 10 years and 24% between five and 10 years, according to the National Judicial Data Grid. It is these problems that Adityanath should have paid attention to.

We could not find any comprehensive official account of the 20,000 cases withdrawn in pursuit of this unusual and controversial statute. But we found significant instances of this in the media. In addition to Adityanath, Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya was also let off in two cases registered in Kaushambi a decade earlier.

The government initiated the process to withdraw 11 cases against the BJP Agra MP Ram Shankar Katheria. Katheria was also the chairman of the National Commission for Scheduled Castes. In addition, the state government withdrew 131 cases against the accused in the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013.

The story of impunity for hate crimes by the state government would be incomplete without a reference to the Uttar Pradesh government’s move to recommend that the court withdraw all charges that had been made against 18 men accused of the lynching of a Muslim farmer, Mohammad Akhlaq, in Dadri a decade earlier. This led to wide outrage. The courts on December 23, 2025, rejected the recommendation.

A brief recap of this horrific hate crime barely an hour away from the national capital. On September 28, 2015, a loudspeaker in the temple in Bisahda village announced that Akhlaq had slaughtered a calf during the festival of Eid ul Adha a few days earlier. A crowd armed with sticks, bricks and stones stormed into his home, checked the contents of his fridge and dragged him and his son Danish out of the house.

On March 31, 2019, one of the prime accused in the case, Vishal, was seen sitting in the front row of a BJP rally addressed by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath in Bishahra.

All the accused men got bail by September 2017. It took almost five years for charges to be framed. The trial should have concluded in the fast-track court in just a few months. But a decade later, it was still fixing witness testimonies. Before this was concluded and the court could pronounce its verdict, the Adityanath government directed the prosecution to request the court to withdraw the case.

However, the judge of the Surajpur Fast-Track court Saurabh Dwivedi firmly turned down the withdrawal plea. The application, he said in a salutary judgment, lacked any legal basis and was “baseless and irrelevant.”

Meanwhile, Akhlaq’s family continues to battle the grief and trauma of his lynching. Jaan Mohammad, Akhlaq’s brother said to The Quint, “Those who killed Akhlaq did it so brutally that anyone else can do it today with impunity.” Akhlaq’s family left the village.

“Whenever my mother and sister recalled the night, tears rolled down their cheeks,” Akhlaq’s son Danish said. “We haven’t yet overcome the shock.”

I am grateful for research support from Sumaiya Fatima

Source: Scroll
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