In his over eight years as Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath has repeatedly signalled a profound disregard for constitutional constraints and for the rule of law. His government has deployed bulldozers for retributive targeting of Muslim properties without any judicial process. Through this, the Yogi government has created an incendiary template adopted by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) governments countrywide.
The Yogi government has been savage in its crushing of dissent. The CM remains vitriolic in his hate speech targeting India’s Muslims. He has closed 20,000 criminal cases including those of hate speech, hate crimes, and the communal carnage of Muzaffarnagar in 2013. These include crimes of his own hate speech, as a Member of Parliament.
And then there is his resort to “encounters” on a staggering scale. “Encounters” is popular jargon for extrajudicial shootings by the police or other uniformed security forces that kill, injure, and sometimes permanently disable persons.
The magnitude of these shootouts announced proudly by the UP government is stunning. Its professed numbers work out to roughly one extrajudicial shooting every five hours in over eight years since Adityanath took office as the CM in 2017. One person is killed in these shootouts every fortnight throughout these eight years.