Pastor Ritesh Joshua had just called a tea break when he saw the men
in the saffron scarves. More than a hundred, some wielding sticks, had
massed outside his white stucco church on the outskirts of Gorakhpur, a
temple town in eastern Uttar Pradesh. It was three days after Christmas.
“They started shouting, ‘You are converting people. We will not allow
any conversions here’,” he says. “They shoved people, turned over
furniture, and told me, ‘You are the main culprit’.”
The men, allegedly part of a religious activist group called the
Hindu Yuva Vahini, cornered one of the parishioners. Smartphone footage
shows the woman pulling her blue shawl tightly around herself as she
answers questions about her involvement with the church. “No one is
forcing me to convert,” she insists.
“If the police hadn’t arrived, we don’t know what would have happened
next,” Joshua says. “After the men left, everyone in the church was
silent, so frightened. This is a time of testing for us.”
Last week, the monk who founded the HYV, and whose firebrand Hindu
supremacist vision guides the organisation, was selected by the party of
prime minister Narendra Modi to lead the most populous state in India – the equivalent of the sixth largest nation on earth.
Yogi Adityanath’s appointment
as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, about a fifth of whose 200 million
people are Muslim, is “stunning”, says Milan Vaishnav, at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, a foreign policy thinktank. “He is an
extremist in terms of his speeches, a very proud rabble-rouser, and
somebody who doesn’t have a claim to fame other than a dedication to a
strident form of Hindu nationalism.”
“It is an important and disturbing moment,” agrees Ramachandran Guha,
an author and historian. “It is the fringe moving to the mainstream.”
The boyish face of Adityanath, 44, beamed down on Gorakhpur last week
from thousands of green-and-saffron banners plastered along its main
road. On Sunday, tens of thousands of people are expected to line the
road for his triumphant return to Gorakhpur, the electorate he has
represented for almost two decades in the Uttar Pradesh parliament.
Another addition to the city streets last week were squads of police
officers hunting so-called “Romeos”. Along with a ban on buffalo
slaughter, cracking down on amorous young men was a key campaign promise
of the ruling Bharatiya Janata party. Officially, the police are
targeting “Eve-teasing”, the endemic sexual harassment that blights some
Indian streets. But critics instead see a crackdown on mixed-religion
couples, in line with Adityanath’s fevered, baseless warnings that
Muslim men are trying to seduce Hindu women as part of “love jihad”.
The surprise appointment of Adityanath to run the state has deeply
rattled Manoj Singh, a Gorakhpur journalist who has spent the last two
decades tracking the new chief minister and the HYV men he labels a
“private army”. He recalls, 10 years ago, when the city boiled with
religious tension after the murder of a Hindu man, and Adityanath rose
to address a crowd of HYV supporters outside the Gorakhpur railway
station.
“We cannot tolerate such incidents any more,” he told the men.
“It has crossed all limits. If someone sets ablaze the houses and shops
of Hindus, then I do not think that someone stops you from doing such
things.
“Get ready for a final battle,” he says. Court documents allege
Adityanath’s followers then went on a rampage, burning Muslim-owned
properties and an Islamic mausoleum. “I saw the burned shops,” Singh
says. “I saw the Muslim men who ran the shops trying to douse the fire. I
knew one of the shopkeepers. He was very emotional. He said, ‘Look what
has happened to me. I’m ruined’.”
Adityanath was arrested and imprisoned for 11 days. He broke down in
parliament recalling the ordeal. But, Singh says, his fiery rhetoric was
unchanged. “If [Muslims] kill one Hindu man, then we will kill 100
Muslim men,” he has said since. But Adityanath began to distance himself
from frontline violence. “He took a political turn,” Singh says. “He
started having political dreams.”
Hinduism is a poor soil for fundamentalists such as Adityanath to
grow. The world’s third most-practised religion has no pope, no
mandatory scripture, no impulse to convert new believers. The caste
system has sown division deep into its DNA. Wherever Hinduism
has taken and flourished across Asia it has blended with and infused
local cultures, forming what author Sunil Khilnani has called a
“bewildering internal pluralism”.
It was contact with more rigid doctrines, first the Islam of the
Mughals, then the Christianity of the British, that first planted the
seeds of political Hinduism. They grew with demands for Indian
independence, as those who sought freedom for the extraordinarily
diverse subcontinent grappled with the question: what was an Indian,
anyway?
Jawarharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, opted for the broadest possible answer. The India
his Congress party advocated was, he wrote, proudly plural: “An ancient
palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been
inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased
what had been written previously”.
But Hindu nationalists such as Vinayak Savarkar,
discerned in the countless communities that populated modern-day India,
Pakistan and Bangladesh an essential “Hindutva”, or Hindu-ness, that
persisted no matter what faith an Indian practised.
“Religious minorities will all have the right to practise their
religion”, Savarkar wrote of the India he envisioned – but they were
inescapably citizens of a Hindu “rashtra”, or nation.
“This vision of Indian history is one of victimhood,” says Guha.
“That Hindus were first persecuted by the Muslims, then the British, and
they can only recover when they repudiate all that is Muslim and
British in their past.”
The elevation of Adityanath is part of that “old battle between the
Congress and the rightwing Hindu parties”, he says. For the first 40
years after independence, Hindu nationalists struggled to summon more
than 10% of the national vote. But their appeal has surged in the past
quarter-century, culminating in the election three years ago of Modi,
the staunchest Hindutva flag bearer ever to occupy the prime minister’s
residence.
Other than Modi’s political talents, Guha says the growth of Hindu
nationalism is partly down to poor leadership in the Congress party,
whose most prominent leader is Nehru’s great-grandson, Rahul Gandhi.
“But it is also part of a regional and global phenomenon of religious
nationalism. You see it now in Turkey, and in our neighbourhood, with
Pakistan and Bangladesh. There are parallels with Sri Lanka. And even in
America, when George Bush said Jesus was his favourite philosopher,You
can’t blame Rahul Gandhi for everything,” he says.
Modi was briefly an international pariah over his Gujarat state
government’s alleged role in ignoring, and possibly abetting, deadly
Hindu-Muslim riots in the state in 2002. But he assiduously reinvented
his image in the decade before winning power in 2014, projecting himself as a pro-business, Apple Watch-sporting statesman obsessed with economic development.
In power, Modi has been coy about his Hindu nationalist agenda,
prioritising issues such as tax reform and corruption crackdowns over
the national ban on cow slaughter his party championed on the campaign
trail.
With the selection of Adityanath, “the veil has been lifted”, says
Vaishnav, from the Carnegie Endowment. “It answers one of the questions
that we had about Modi all along,” he says. “Is this guy’s project about
development or Hindu nationalism? What this pick reaffirms is that it’s
not an either/or question. He has two faces: one is Modi the great
economic moderniser, and the other is one of muscular nationalism – and
Adit is its starkest manifestation,” he says.
In Zafara Bazar, a Muslim district of Gorakhpur, Gulshan Ali is
talking bitterly near the butcher shop where he worked until last
Monday: “They talked about ‘development for all’, but the moment
Adityanath became chief minister he started taking away our jobs,” he
says. That was when – less than 24 hours after Adityanath was sworn in –
police officers told him the business was being shut. “We didn’t get
any notice,” another butcher, Jawad Ali, says. He pleaded that his shop
sold only buffalo, not the cow meat that many Hindus eschew. “But they
told me, ‘From today, your business is closed’.”
A thick blanket now hangs over Jawad Ali’s shopfront, and he passes
his days with other out-of-work butchers reading the newspaper and
gossiping darkly about what might be coming next. “For several
generations we’ve been butchers,” he says. He admits he has been
operating his shop unlicensed for the 15 years – but not for lack of
trying. “Since 2002 the government stopped renewing meat licences
because of Yogi Adityanath and his movement,” he says.
A previous government, one that relied on Muslim votes to hold
office, worked out a compromise between its voter base and the growing
clamour to ban cow and buffalo meat in the state: butchers such as Ali
would be denied licences, but allowed to continue running their
businesses.
The bargain held until Adityanath’s unexpected ascension. The
crackdown on butchers has left up to 2,500 families in Gorakhpur without
an income.
Heightening their frustration is that India is the world’s largest
exporter of buffalo meat, with most of the companies run by Hindus who
see no clash with their beliefs. “Here they’ve found a new god in
buffalo,” one of the meat-workers mutters.
The chief preoccupation for many Muslims in the city is what comes
next for the HYV. A few kilometres from Zafar Bazar is the resplendent
Gorakhnath Mutt, a campus of ornate, chalky white temples interspersed
with manmade ponds and patches of yellow and saffron marigolds.
The temple, which Adityanath oversees as chief priest, was buzzing
this week with political officials and HYV men basking in the glow of
their leader’s sudden promotion. “You talk to many Muslims, in and
around the campus here, they all appreciate that Yogi Adityanath has
become chief minister,” says Pramod Kumar Mall, the officer in charge of
the HYV.
The role of the HYV, now that its leader is the most powerful man in
Uttar Pradesh, will not change, says HYV officer Pramod Kumar Mall. “We
are working for the nationalist movement. We don’t want this country to
disintegrate. There are so many movements who want to disintegrate the
system, and we want to stop them and make people understand about it,”
he says.
Regrettably, he says, there are “many” Muslims in the country working
against Indian interests. “Just as President Trump has found so many,
in India you will find so many.” But he is adamant that minorities in
the state have nothing to fear from Adityanath’s rule. “This country
belongs to them,” he says. “[As long as] they feel they are citizens of
this country and feel they should respect the national religion – just
as Hinduism has accepted many religions.”
Despite Mall’s assurances, Muslim community leaders in Gorakhpur are
well aware of the new reality in their state. Over tea at his home,
surgeon Wijahat Kareem, 62, describes his own political philosophy as
“Gandhian”. “But Gandhi is losing his sheen,” he says. He chooses his
words carefully. “You cannot change his heart,” he says of the new chief
minister. “He will definitely favour Hindus over Muslims, but we can’t
complain. This is what he has been since the beginning. You know with
whom you are talking But there is hope that because of his past record
he will be more cautious, more liberal than he was earlier on,” he says.
Hope, he concedes, is all Uttar Pradesh’s Muslims have left to rely
on. “Politicians cannot win on the basis of Muslim votes,” he says. “So
we have to keep believing in the right-thinking Hindus. That’s what we
are all hoping for. Our staying in the mainstream of the country depends
on them.”
He insists, repeatedly, that he is “not concerned”. But as he goes to
say goodbye he pauses in the door frame. For a moment he is silent.
“Let us pray for the Muslims of Gorakhpur,” he finally says. “Even if
Yogi is harming Muslims in other parts of the country, he won’t do
anything to Muslims in Gorakhpur. Of that I’m very sure.”
