Resources for all concerned with culture of authoritarianism in society, banalisation of communalism, rise of the far right in India (and with occasional information on other countries of South Asia and beyond)
Butcher Thrashed By UP Cops For Allegedly Selling Beef Dies At AIIMS
Salim Qureshi alias Munna was picked up by two police constables on
June 14 from his home and taken to a private wedding hall where they
beat him up severely, his wife Farzana has alleged in a complaint lodged
with the police.
Qasim's family, at their home in Pilkhuwa. On 18 June, Qasim was lynched on the suspicion of being involved in cow slaughter.
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Two days after Eid-ul-fitr, on 18 June, Mohammad Qasim, a 50-year-old
residing in Hapur district’s Pilkhuwa town, received a phone call. He
left home soon after—between 10 and 10.30 am. He told his son Mahtab
that he would return with a goat or buffalo. He did not name the caller,
but said that he had been offered a deal on the purchase of the animals
in Bajhera Khurd, a village about 7 kilometres away. Mahtab assumed
that the caller was an acquaintance of his father’s.
At about 4 pm that day, Mahtab recounted, he received a call from a
neighbour, who told him that Qasim was at the Pilkhuwa Kotwali. “Thane gaye, thane mein nahi milein. Fir hospital gaye, wahan pe unki laash thi.” (We went to the police station, but he was not there. Then we went to the hospital. His body was there.) “Sharir pe nishaan the—dande ke, chakku ke, daranti ke” (There were marks on his body—of sticks, of knives, and of axes.)
Qasim worked as a butcher, and sold goat and buffalo meat. On 21
June, I visited his home—located about 70 kilometres east of Delhi, down
National Highway 9. Along with his family, he lived in a rented room in
a two-storey building in Pilkhuwa. Two goats were tied out front.
Mahtab, 20, is the oldest of his six children. He makes a living selling
fruit from a cart.
What happened after Qasim left has now been widely reported—upon
reaching the spot purportedly for making the purchase, Qasim was
attacked by a mob, brutally beaten, and lynched. A widely circulated
video shows Qasim in a barren field located in the village Bajhera
Khurd, in Uttar Pradesh’s Hapur district. He is surrounded by a group of
men who are thrashing him— Rajputs residing in Bajhera Khurd, according
to village residents I later spoke with. The attackers can be heard
calling Qasim a “sisterfucker” and a “pig.” Qasim appears to be in
extreme pain—he is only half-conscious, and the flesh around his right
ankle seems to have been hacked off. At one point, he collapses. The men
can be heard discussing whether or not he should be given water and
allowed to live. The video appears to have been shot in the presence of
policemen; a voice from the crowd can be heard referring to a policeman
present nearby. “Policemen found the cows,” the voice yells. “The ones
standing right here.”
Another man was attacked as well—Mohammed Samiuddin, a resident of
the bordering village Madapur, who reportedly came to Qasim’s help. He
was severely beaten up and is currently in the ICU at Devnandini
Hospital in Hapur city. An image of Qasim, at his home in Pilkhuwa. (Credit: Shahid Tantray for The Caravan.)
Qasim’s family members told me that he was attacked because the
Rajputs suspected he was involved in cow slaughter. “Hindus caught him
and lynched him for attempting to slaughter a cow,” Salim, Qasim’s
younger brother, said. The family members said that there was no truth
to this allegation. “Where is the blood in the field? Where is the
weapon with which he allegedly slaughtered the cow?” Salim continued,
“My brother was killed because he was Muslim… why else would he have
been killed?”
I spoke to over 20 residents of Pilkhuwa, including several who were
unacquainted with Qasim’s family. They all repeated the same sequence of
events, as they had heard it: according to them, Qasim was headed to
Bajhera to buy cattle where he was waylaid by Hindus and was brutally
beaten and killed, on the suspicion of carrying out cow slaughter. All
of these persons said that Samiuddin was present in the field where the
attack took place, and attempted to intervene. These residents said that
they had heard of the incident from those living in Madapur
village—where Samiuddin resided. They believed that the murder of Qasim
was a hate crime against Muslims, and a part of larger conspiracy. “Ye sochte hain huqumat hamari hai,” Mohammed Irfan, Qasim’s brother in law, said. (These people think it is their rule.) “Yogi ne keh diya gai hamari maata hai, gai ko koi na kate, koi na chhede, kaatne wale ko umar qaid. Unhone dekh liya ki ab isse badiya koi neeti nahi hai. Musalamano ko maro, kaato aur gai rakh do.”
(Yogi Adityanath has said that the cow is our mother, that no one
should slaughter or touch cows, and that whoever does should be
sentenced to life in prison. They have seen that there could be nothing
better than this—beat Muslims, kill them, maim them, and keep a cow by
them.)
In Bajhera, where the assailants reside, many residents told me that
they had heard that Qasim and Samiuddin intended to slaughter a cow and a
calf in a farm behind a temple, located close to the spot of the
attack. This alleged plan, several residents said, spurred the Rajputs
to attack the men, and led to the lynching. Samiuddin, at the hospital. (Credit: Shahid Tantray for The Caravan)
But the FIR on the incident tells a different story—though all
accounts indicate a suspicion of cow slaughter, it claims that the
incident was one of road rage. The police officials at Pilkhuwa Kotwali,
under which Bajhera falls, have registered a case against 25 unknown
persons. The case was registered under Sections 147, 148, 307, and 302
of the Indian Penal Code—punishment for rioting, rioting with deadly
weapon, attempt to murder and murder, respectively. The police have
arrested two Rajput men: Yudhister Sisodia and Rakesh Sisodia, both
residing in Bajhera. I examined the diary entry of the incident—the
first-ever record, by police procedure, on which the FIR is often
based—and spoke to various officers involved with the case. My reporting
made it evident that the police was attempting to cover up the fact
that Qasim and Samiuddin were attacked on suspicion of their involvement
in cow slaughter.
*
Until 2012, Pilkhuwa town and the villages Bajhera and Madapur came under the administrative jurisdiction of Hapur tehsil
of Ghaziabad district, following which the Hapur district was created.
According to the 2011 census, Hindus comprise nearly 68 percent of the
tehsil’s residents, and Muslims 31 percent. The three places—Pilkhuwa,
Bajhera Khurd and Madapur—are part of the Dhaulana constituency, the
representative of which is a Bahujan Samaj Party leader, Aslam
Choudhary. Much of Dhaulana falls under Ghaziabad district—it is the
only constituency of six in the district that the BSP won in the 2017
state assembly elections. The other five were won by the BJP.
Choudhury defeated the BJP’s Ramesh Chandra Tomar, a four-time MP from
Dhaulana. According to Qasim’s neighbour Jaluluddin, the Rajputs in
Bajhera were enraged by Tomar’s loss. “They blamed the Muslims for it,”
he said.
The residents of Bajhera Khurd did not contest the reasons behind the
attack that the Pilkhuwa residents had described—many plainly told me
that the attackers gathered to beat up the alleged cow-killers. I
visited the home of Rakesh, one of the men who has been arrested.
Rakesh’s daughter—she appeared to be in her late twenties, and refused
to tell me her name—claimed that when her father had reached the spot,
young teenagers were already beating up Qasim. She claimed that
Samiuddin had managed to flee by this time.
As I sat in Rakesh’s house, many other women and children joined us.
They all said that they were not present at the scene. Not one of them
appeared to be fazed by the lynching: according to them, the attackers
had done no wrong. “Accha khasa baith ke gaya gaadi mein, itna bhi nahi mara ki mar jayega,” Rakesh’s daughter said. (He sat in the car and went, they didn’t beat him enough to kill him). “Ilaj ke dauran mara hai.” (He died during treatment.)
In another video of the attack that was circulated on WhatsApp, a
mustachioed man is seen questioning where Qasim is from. Salim and Irfan
identified the man as Kiranpal Singh, a resident of Bajhera. I visited
Kiranpal’s home as well. His daughter Lalita admitted that her father
was indeed the man in the video, but said that he was only asking Qasim
for his address and played no role in beating him. Lalita and two other
women also admitted that the suspicion of cow slaughter was what incited
the Bajhera Rajputs to attack the two Muslims.
Both Kiranpal and Rakesh’s families showed me copies of an article published in Amar Ujala on
19 June, describing the lynching. Accompanying the news report is an
image of a cow and a calf with the caption: “Cow and calf seized from
the crime scene by Police.” Two policemen were visible in the background
of the photo. Interestingly, the article itself contained no mention of
the cow or the calf.
Lalita said that the police had, in fact, seized a cow and a calf
from the spot, and that the cows had been kept at the home of another
resident of Bajhera. She called this man to her home as well—he, too,
refused to divulge his name. The man, who looked to be about 40 years
old, told me that the police had taken the cattle away the night of the
lynching, and that no one had seen it again.
None of these accounts—neither the testimonies of the residents of
Madapur, Pilkhuwa and Bajhera Khurd, nor the videos—have made it into
the FIR or formed part of the police investigation yet. Not a single
person I met who was associated with the attack suggested that it had
anything to do with road rage. Further, crucial evidence in the case
appeared to have been either misplaced or destroyed.
During my visit, I accessed the diary entry for the incident. At all
police stations, it is customary to make an entry when a call regarding
an incident or complaint is received. It is based on this entry that the
police begins a preliminary inquiry and determines whether an offense
is cognisable. The entry for the attack makes no mention of any road
accident. Under the column for the “cause of the incident,” it reads:
“Unidentified accused surrounded Qasim and his friend Samiuddin and beat
them up with sticks, during which Samiuddin was injured grievously,
while his friend Qasim died during treatment.” Shahid Tantray for The Caravan
The description in the FIR, which is signed by Samiuddin’s brother
Yaseen, is completely different. The document lists Yaseen as having
stated: “My brother Samiuddin, while he along with Qasim was going from
Madapur to Dhaulana via Bajhera, was hit by a motorcycle. When he
protested … the motorist called around 25-30 people … who beat them up
with sticks.”
This account is not borne out by my reporting. I met Yaseen at
Devinanadan hospital, where Samiuddin is being treated. He told me that
he did not write the FIR and signed it because he was asked to by the
person who wrote it—Dinesh Parmar, a Rajput of neighbouring village
Hindalpur, and an acquaintance of Samiuddin.
I spoke to Parmar over phone. He told me that the circle officer,
Pawan Kumar, pressured him to write whatever the latter narrated (The
circle office is a police official whose rank is equivalent to that of a
Deputy Superintendent of Police. Most circle officers are in-charge of
three police stations in their subdivision.) Parmar said, “I told him
this was wrong. I asked him why he”—Samiuddin—“would pass through the
place that is Madapur’s jungle to go to Dhaulana at noon in summertime.
But he asked me not to bother about what was being written because it
was he who was going to investigate it anyway.”
According to Parmar, Samiuddin had gone to his farm—which later became the site of the lynching—to fetch jowar.
A few cows were already wandering in the field, he said. He added that
Samiuddin ran into Qasim, who was passing by, and that the two sat down
to smoke bidis. Parmar said that a young man named Hasan had accompanied Samiuddin. The
field where Qasim is said to have first been spotted by the villagers.
The spot is visible for miles around. (Credit: Shahid Tantray for The
Caravan)
“Someone saw them and spread the word that they were there to
slaughter a cow,” Parmar told me. Hasan escaped, Parmar continued, and
reached Hindalpur, where he took shelter in Parmar’s home. It was Hasan
who narrated this incident to him, he said. I contacted Hasan over the
phone. He admitted that he was with Samiuddin on the day of the attack,
but refused to speak further.
I visited the field where the Bajhera attackers allegedly spotted the
three men. It is piece of ploughed land of approximately 600 square
yards that has no crop growing on it, amid tens of other empty and
cropped fields. There are no houses with a radius of at least a
kilometre of the plot. The temple was located over 500 metres away from
the spot. The place where Qasim is seen to be collapsing in the video
was also at least a kilometre away from the field—implying that he may
have been either forced or carried by the mob. That field, too, was
plain and open. It is implausible to imagine anyone picking that field
as a site to slaughter a cow—any person on that field would have been
visible from miles away. When I pointed this out to the villagers in
Bajhera villagers, many claimed that on the day of the attack, the field
was covered with jowar—which is a tall crop. They claimed the police
had razed the field clean on the same night.
No one in Bajhera was able to explain how Qasim came to the second
spot. Some men in Pilkhuwa, however, said they believed that Qasim was
tied to a bike and was dragged by Rajputs to the field.
The police did not investigate these accounts. The day I reached
Bajhera, the station house officer, Ashwini Kumar, who is also
investigating officer in the case, the circle officer, Pawan Kumar, and
the sub-divisional officer Hanuman Prasad Maurya were leading a meeting
with the villagers at a government school in Bajhera. Kumar said it was a
“shanti sabha”—a peace meeting. All the attendees were Hindu—no
resident of Pilkhuwa was present. Kumar asked me not to cover the
meeting, and to stay off the premises. When I refused to leave, two
security guards escorted me out.
After the meeting, I asked Kumar what was discussed at the gathering.
He told me that some men of Bajhera had left the village, fearing
arrest. “I told them there is no need to fear as we will not touch any
innocents,” Kumar said. I then asked Kumar if Qasim was killed on
suspicion of cow slaughter or due to an incident of road rage, as the
FIR claimed. “We didn’t seize any cows,” Kumar replied, and did not
clarify further. When I asked about the Amar Ujala picture, he said, “Go to the spot. You will find cows everywhere. If somebody clicks a picture, what can we say?”
I asked Kumar if he qualified the incident as a hate crime. “No,” he said.
Salim, Qasim’s brother, told me that the police did not return
Qasim’s mobile phone to his family. The investigating officials did,
however, hand over the blood-soaked vest and the shorts that he was
wearing at the time of the attack. Salim said that the police claimed
they did not find a mobile phone.
The police officers gave me contradictory answers when I brought this
up—Pawan Kumar told me that the mobile phone had been returned to the
family, while Ashwini Kumar, the investigating officer in the case,
refused to divulge what he seized from Qasim’s person and the crime
scene. He merely said that all seized objects were part of the
investigation.
Pawan Kumar also told me that the seized clothes were yet to be sent
to the forensic department for examination. He was not able to specify
which items of clothing the officers had seized, and which they intended
to send to forensics. Mahtab, Qasim’s son, said that the family had
buried the clothes that were returned to them, along with the
body—effectively, the evidence has been destroyed.
Another troubling aspect of the investigation is that no FIR was
taken from Qasim’s family members, on the grounds that there cannot be
two reports registered regarding the same case. The only FIR that has
been registered is under Yaseen’s name. Pawan Kumar said that Qasim’s
family members have been made witnesses in the case.
When I asked if the statements of the Qasim’s family had been taken,
Kumar evaded my question. He said that he has been in touch with the
family “since the cremation.” When I pressed him further, he admitted
that no written statement had been taken from the Qasim’s family.
Another picture of the incident has gone viral—it depicts a group of
men carrying Qasim by his limbs. The picture was met with outrage
online, as many considered it proof of the police’s complicity. On 21
June, the office of the UP director general posted an apology on Twitter:
“We apologise for the incident. All three policemen seen in the picture
have been transferred to Police Lines and an enquiry has been ordered.”
Ashwini Kumar is one of the police officers visible in the image. Ashwini described the men carrying Qasim as “aam public”—civilians—that
were helping the police take Qasim to the police van. When I noted that
the image appeared to show the men torturing Qasim and not helping him,
Ashwini said, “The man weighed around a quintal and needed more men to
carry him.” Contrary to the DGP’s claim on Twitter, when I visited the
area on 21 June, Ashwini was still leading the Philkuwa Kotwali. He
chaired the peace meeting along with the CO and the SDO, and also spoke
to me in the capacity of the investigating officer.
As the time this piece was published, Qasim’s family was still
awaiting the postmortem report. Kiranpal, who the deceased’s family was
able to identify, had neither been detained nor arrested, nor were most
of the men visible in the videos, all of whom were easily identifiable.
According to the police, Hasan’s statement had not been taken as of 22
June, even though he was available over the phone to me.
According to Kunwar Ayyub Ali, a BSP leader who is a lawyer popular
among the residents of Pilkhuwa, since the first FIR does not mention
“communal lynching” and “cow slaughtering,” the “line of investigation
will be different from the beginning to end.”
Aslam Chowdhary, the MLA from the Dhaulana seat, blamed the Yogi
government for the incident and told me that there was a sense of
impunity among some Hindus. “They kill whoever they want to,” he said.
On 20 December 2017, Veerendra Kumar, a Janata Dal MP, had asked the
central government in the Rajya Sabha if it “has any proposal to bring a
stringent law against mob lynching.” Hansraj Gangaram Ahir, the
minister of state for home, had replied: “No such proposal is under
consideration.”
GUWAHATI: As Centre is set to complete counting the Indian citizens living inAssam by
June-end and list their names in the National Register of Citizens
(NRC) and exclude illegal settlers from Bangladesh, five UN special
rapporteurs have jointly have written to Union minister of external
affairsSushma Swarajand
reminded her of India’s obligation to adhere to international human
rights norms and standards against racial discrimination.
The
rapporteurs on minority issues, contemporary forms of racism, promotion
and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and on freedom of
religion or belief in their letter stated, “There is no official policy
outlining the implications for those who will be excluded from the final
NRC. It is reported that they will be treated as foreigners and that
their citizenship rights may be revoked in the absence of a prior trial.
They may subsequently be asked to prove their citizenship before
so-called Foreigners’ Tribunals.”
They stated that NRC update has
generated increased anxiety and concerns among the Bengali Muslim
minority in Assam, “who have long been discriminated against due to
their perceived status as foreigners, despite possessing the necessary
documents to prove their citizenship.” [ . . . ]
Mob justice, mostly on the basis of social media rumour is threatening
to drive our civilised society back to the dark age. We seem to be in a
hurry to reach there. The image of a mob dragging the victim’s body with
police in the lead will haunt us forever. Where are we heading? Mail Today cartoon. https://www.cartoonistsatish.com/hapur-mob-march-where-are-we-heading/
Nandini Sundar (nandinisundar[at]yahoo.com)
teaches sociology at the University of Delhi.
Foot Soldier of the Constitution: A Memoir by Teesta Setalvad, LeftWord Books, 2017; pp 226, ₹280.
What does the Constitution really mean? Who interprets it? Who
implements it? This book by one of India’s most courageous citizens
offers us some insight into these questions. It also explains why
someone like Teesta Setalvad who has been not just a foot soldier
but also a general defending the Constitution, is enemy No 1 for a
regime bent on destroying it.
Why do people believe so deeply in the Constitution, and the promise of
fraternity and equality that it embodies? For Setalvad, some of this
belief in the Constitution came from her own lineage of legal
luminaries; and her account of her growing-up years is
interesting. But Setalvad also recognises that she is not alone—that
this belief is shared by many others, including the survivors of the
ghastly communal violence she describes—the victims of the Gulberg
housing society in Ahmedabad and the Naroda Patiya
massacre. That they have not taken to retaliatory violence and instead
pursued their cases through the courts is a testimony to this
unshakeable belief.
Although she is best known for her work in seeking justice for survivors
of the Gujarat genocide of 2002, Setalvad’s account places her efforts
regarding the Gujarat violence in the context of a long history of
journalistic coverage of and engagement with communal
violence. She and her partner Javed Anand started Sabrang
Communications and Communalism Combat in 1993. Some of her
descriptions of witnessing communal violence are startling—seeing
someone’s hand chopped off in front
of her, and desperately working the phones in Gujarat in 2002—among
others. The book also brings back the horrors of 2002 like the killing
of Kausar Bano and her nine-month-old foetus at swordpoint, and a small
child whose entire family had been wiped out
in front of him.
For at least five years before the Gujarat genocide, she had been
touring the country warning people that there was a terrible build-up of
communalisation, censuses were being conducted of Muslims and
Christians, and that textbooks were full of hate. I have
heard her speak with urgency and detailed factual backup at one of
these meetings. As a lawyer and civil liberties activist, K Balagopal
commented in the August 2003 issue of Communalism Combat that the
journal was remarkably
prescient. In some sense, we are all living through that kind of
prescient horror now, knowing that fascism is upon us, but not knowing
how to stop it.
The book also offers several insights arising out of her career as a
journalist and activist, for example, on the importance of beat
reporting, covering the Antulay cement scam trial, the world of Bombay
journalism in the 1980s, the critical importance of institutions
to maintaining democracy, the need for universities to teach courses on
the history and sociology of riots, and the fact that peace must
eventually come through a combination of demands upon the system and
citizen action to promote harmony.
No Level Playing Field
The most interesting chapters of the book, however, are the last two
where she describes the tortuous processes of seeking justice in the
Supreme Court through a court-monitored special investigation team (SIT)
and the recurrent legal cases against her, the
most recent ones timed neatly with the filing of the Zakia Jafri case.
This case directly names Narendra Modi as a potential accused, and
raises the critical question of command responsibility.
When Setalvad describes the functioning of the SIT, the story becomes
sadly familiar. The petitioners are denied copies of the SIT’s report
while the accused, the State of Gujarat does receive these copies. This
was much like the National Human Rights Commission,
who when asked by the Supreme Court in 2008 to investigate the Salwa
Judum in Chhattisgarh, acted as if it was the petitioners who were the
accused, even as it worked closely with the state and central
governments.
As the author notes:
It has been found time and
again, that the Courts, even the Supreme Court, treat petitioners or
interveners who are rights advocates or witness/victim survivors on a
different plane than
the mighty state. When the rights advocates or witnesses initiate legal
action they are often merely given a formal role—their submissions
heard by the Court. But they are not taken as seriously as the views of
the State. Interventions are subtly relegated
into a hierarchy. Procedural fair play is subverted and substantive
shifts take place in jurisprudence. (p 148)
What totally buries the idea that the courts provide a level playing
field is the ease with which petitioners can be tormented by seemingly
unconnected and entirely false cases. How is it that so many petitioners
in human rights cases are embezzlers, murderers
and what not? In Setalvad’s case, she has been charged, among other
things, with misusing funds and violating the Foreign Contribution
(Regulation) Act; one of my co-petitioners in the Salwa Judum case,
Kartam Joga, was in jail for two years for supposedly
being involved in an ambush of the Central Reserve Police Force. I have
been accused of murder, rioting and bearing arms. And yet, somehow
these clear misuses of the state’s machinery to coerce and deter
petitioners are not taken seriously by the media or
courts with corresponding strictures passed against the state for
harassing their opponents. In Setalvad’s case, she lives on the edge of
being arrested and it is a wonder that she has managed to bring up
children, and continue her work.
The book also highlights another familiar fact: senior Supreme Court
lawyers defending the state are getting paid lakhs per hearing, ranged
as they are against desperate survivors, activists and pro bono lawyers.
Setalvad brings out the dubious role played
by amicus Harish Salve in accepting R K Raghavan as head of the SIT at
Gujarat counsel, Mukul Rohatgi’s suggestion, without consulting the
petitioners. Raghavan concluded that there was not enough evidence of a
conspiracy to charge Modi. When Modi, armed with
this “clean chit,” went on to become the Prime Minister, Raghavan found
himself appointed as India’s High Commissioner to Cyprus.
One of the most moving passages of the book is her joint tribute to
Maulana Umarji and Veer Bhadra Mishra of Varanasi. Maulana Umarji ran
the Godhra camp, was imprisoned and falsely implicated in the Godhra
train burning incident, and did not even get bail
from the Supreme Court while the perpetrators of the most heinous
crimes against Muslims got bail within six months. The latest in this genre is the acquittal of Maya Kodnani.
Autobiographies are always difficult to write but they are essential,
because India and the world need to know what inspires and sustains
someone like Setalvad. Tighter editing by the publishers would have
eliminated repetitions that have crept in here and
there. For instance, on page 59 we are told that she comes from a
family of distinguished lawyers—this after 10 pages of description of
their legal careers. Several issues, for example, mass graves and the
appointment of Raghavan as head of the SIT are repeated
in different places. In many cases the description of an event or a
phenomenon degenerates into a list of family and friends who supported
her through it. One hopes that when the book goes into a second
printing, the publishers will take care of these distracting
irritants.
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath (L) and yoga Guru Baba Ramdev. Photos: AFP
Yoga entrepreneur Baba Ramdev’s close association with Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the parent body of the ruling Bhartiya Janata
Party (BJP), has eventually paid off.
His dream project called the Food & Herbal Park was given full
clearance on Tuesday after being stuck in legal battles for two years.
The speedy approval came after consumer goods company Patanjali
threatened to move its mega food park from Noida in the northern state
of Uttar Pradesh, citing bureaucratic hurdles.
To retain the mega project worth US$1 billion, the State Cabinet, or
council of ministers, resolved a long pending issue by allowing the
transfer of allotted land between two subsidiaries of Patanjali – from
Patanjali Ayurveda Private Limited to Patanjali Food & Herbal Park
Private Limited.
“The Food Park will enjoy the same incentives as committed to [the] Ayurveda Park earlier,” said Satish Mahana, the Minister of Industries in Uttar Pradesh.
However, highly placed government officials said only the cabinet
could take such a decision. “Any decision taken at the bureaucratic
level to allow subleasing of the land between sister companies could
have led to allegations of favoritism owing to revenue loss.”
The food park, touted as the biggest in the country, will be spread
across 455 acres and is supposed to generate 10,000 jobs and produce
goods worth $4 billion annually.
The delay in clearances followed by Patanjali’s Managing Director Acharya Balkrishna tweeting
about shifting the project out of the state was read by many as a rift
between two saffron-robed monks, Ramdev and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister
Yogi Adityanath.
However, observers said it was just a “friendly fight” for public consumption.
Two saffron monks
Their friendliness is well known in political circles. Ramdev was the
first guest to visit Yogi when he became Uttar Pradesh’s chief
ministerin Lucknow in March last year. That visit lasted four hours.
One day later, Ramdev inaugurated the Yoga Festival in Lucknow where
he showered praise on Yogi and said he wanted to develop the state
“together” with him. He also urged the chief minister to include Yoga in
the school curriculum, which was promptly agreed to by the Uttar
Pradesh government.
Ramdev flew to Lucknow again in December to “congratulate” the chief
minister on the BJP’s good performance in the civic polls. BJP leaders,
however, claimed that Ramdev was a “thorough businessman” and had been
close to every ruling party in order to expand his empire. So his
meetings with Yogi should not be viewed as “personal rapport” with the
chief minister, they said. The party admits that the celebrity Yoga guru
is close to RSS and is on good terms with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Win-win situation
To repeat its success in general elections next year, the BJP needs
to perform well in Uttar Pradesh – India’s most populous and politically
significant state which carries the largest number of parliamentary
seats. The party won 75 of the 80 seats there in 2014.
Along with Modi, the party relies heavily on Yogi – the Hindutva’s
poster boy for electoral campaigns who propelled a massive mandate for
the BJP in the State Assembly last year. However, Yogi’s popularity
seems to be on shaky ground on his home turf. Under his leadership, the
BJP has lost three parliamentary seats in recent by-elections, including
Yogi’s parliamentary seat.
On the other hand, Ramdev’s core base is intact, if not growing,
thanks to yoga and his fast-moving consumer goods business, primarily
based on the Ayurved-swadeshi-cows theme, which is similar to the RSS
ideology. The faithful, mostly the middle class, still swear by Ramdev.
That unwavering faith in the leader is the envy of many political
parties.
Ramdev’s ability to blend the spiritual with nationalism and
political rhetoric could make a difference in the 2019 polls, observers
say, just as it did in the 2014 general elections. Uttar Pradesh cannot
afford to lose such a strong campaigner.
Uttar Pradesh, with a huge developmental backlog, needs Ramdev the
businessman as well. Big investors have largely been elusive despite the
all out efforts of Yogi. He has also not succeeded in tackling crime
and corruption, adding up to the anxiety of BJP’s core voters.
Meanwhile, the growing youth population – the median age in the state is 20 – need jobs, which are not in abundance, leading to heavy migration to other states and Gulf countries.
Ramdev’s Patanjali promises to train and involve local farmers and
youth in organic farming and dairy farming. The process could create
goodwill for the BJP in rural areas and possibly change the face of
Uttar Pradesh from a “grain producer state” and “cow belt” to a
processed food-maker.
This project, with packaged food verticals, is a shot in the arm for
Patanjali, which aims to capture a 25% share of the Indian consumer
market in the next few years compared to its 14% share at present.
The company’s revenue over the last fiscal year remained stagnant and
it blamed changes in the tax regime. However, its business has boomed
since the BJP took power. Revenues at the consumer goods enterprise are
soaring – from about $156 million in the financial year ending in March
2013 to about $1.6 billion in 2017.
The firm’s products are available in every corner of the country,
including in the canteens of India’s security forces, Parliament and
malls. Patanjali advertisements echo the RSS’ Hindu nationalist ideology
by appealing to consumers’ patriotism and emphasizing the ancient
Indian medicine system Ayurveda.
Ramdev’s official link with the BJP started in March 2013 when he met
its then chief Rajnath Singh in Delhi. Singh offered to support
Ramdev’s vision and asked him to campaign for the party.
The yoga guru campaigned extensively across India to help make
Narendra Modi the prime minister. A fortnight before the elections,
Ramdev invited Modi to Patanjali’s headquarters in Haridwar, in the
neighboring state of Uttarakhand.
In return, BJP leaders endorsed Ramdev’s vision of India, a populism
laced with assertions of ancient Indian glory and nationalism. Yoga is
also being promoted globally and Modi has taken command. The
collaboration is expected to continue at least until the 2019 elections.
The speedy approval came after consumer goods company Patanjali
threatened to move its mega food park from Noida in the northern state
of Uttar Pradesh, citing bureaucratic hurdles.
