In the UP election campaign, all the things usually used to signal ‘vikas’ — welfare schemes, laptops, housing, jobs — were directly connected with Hindutva
Written by Seema Chishti | The Indian Express, March 21, 2017[. . .]
In the post-2014 scenario, the BJP had displayed an easy to predict pattern of selecting a CM after winning state elections. A virtual non-entity, a low-key pracharak, known to be close to Modi in his earlier days, belonging to a caste group neither dominant, nor significant in that particular state, was handpicked. So, you had M.L. Khattar in Haryana, who was not a Jat, Devendra Fadnavis in Maharashtra, who was not a Maratha, Raghubar Das in Jharkhand, who was not a tribal, all rumoured to run a “WhatsApp sarkar”, operated centrally through the BJP office in Delhi, where ministers were apparently instructed via WhatsApp on the course of action to take.FULL TEXT AT: http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/uttar-pradesh-bjp-hindutva-narendra-modi-yogi-adityanath-chief-minister-4578008/
The selection of Yogi Adityanath, mahant of the Gorakhnath peeth, is a firm break in this three-year tradition. Adityanath has an independent political base and his speeches and actions are bound to have pleased the RSS, but were not run by it. A member of the dominant upper caste in UP, Adityanath’s selection is a clear interpretation of the mandate that Modi wants to give to the UP assembly polls. It is not what the people voted for — in any case, a speculative exercise when no one saw the extent of BJP’s win coming — but it is the interpretation of that result by the BJP’s high command that is significant.
