After a post in February 2014, Yogi Adityanath’s blog fell silent. Even after he became the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh in 2017, there was no post. Suddenly, after the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Yogi Adityanath has started blogging regularly.
His last post was on the International Yoga Day, in Hindi and in Sanskrit. There’s been one on water conservation, one with the text of his speech at the Niti Aayog meeting, and one on the BJP’s excellent performance in the Lok Sabha elections, winning 62 of the 80 seats in UP despite the SP-BSP alliance.
The timeline of Yogi Adityanath’s personal blog tells you how the BJP has been balancing Brand Modi and Brand Yogi in Uttar Pradesh.
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Since Yogi Adityanath became the chief minister in 2017, he has fared rather poorly. His government has made headlines for all the wrong reasons, from encephalitis deaths to rape charges on party colleagues, stray cattle destroying farmers’ crops across the state and poor law and order despite extra-judicial ‘encounter’ killings by the police.
But Yogi’s image took a beating also because he didn’t claim any credit for any good work. All credit was given to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had a Lok Sabha election to win. For example, people reported an improvement in electricity supply and yet complained against Yogi Adityanath. During elections, I met many who were voting for Modi but said Akhilesh was a better CM than Yogi.
So, when reporters travelling in the field found people saying they liked Modi but not Yogi, this was partly a deliberate strategy by the BJP to let Modi take all credit. The BJP-RSS workers, cadres, their WhatsApp networks and media strategies did not even try to counter the beating that Yogi’s image was taking. All narrative strategies were focused on maintaining Brand Modi, turning 2019 polls into a presidential election, and convincing voters to place country over village.
But now that Modi has won, the BJP has immediately started thinking about the UP assembly election in 2022. Hence, you see Yogi Adityanath suddenly re-discovering his blog.
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Opposition leaders will wonder how blogging brings votes. The opposition still does politics the way it was done in the pre-Modi era. Yogi’s blogs get reported by the media and the attempt is to set the agenda and make sure people understand that Yogi is setting the agenda. The opposition isn’t even licking its wounds yet, it’s simply in a funk.
The Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Congress in Uttar Pradesh think that the Lok Sabha elections will not have any bearing on 2022. After all, voters differentiate between central and state leaders. And the state government is highly unpopular thanks to the stray cattle menace, unhappiness among lower OBCs with a government perceived to be dominated by Thakurs, and so on.
But 2022 is three years away. That’s enough time to build thousands of gaushalas, manage the competing caste interests in a better way, and carry out development work in the name of Yogi rather than Modi. This won’t happen overnight, but it has begun.
This is in keeping with the ideas of permanent and positive campaigning that Modi indulges in. Opposition parties, on the other hand, still think politics is done through press conferences and elections are won by just a few big rallies.
Yogi Adityanath is already projecting himself as an able, decisive administrator. As the first step, the bureaucracy is being blamed for everything that’s going wrong. Yogi is already travelling across the state to carry out surprise checks on officials. Newspaper headlines scream: ‘Yogi warns officials, go to the field or take voluntary retirement’. Another one: ‘Action will be taken against officials who sit on a file for more than three days’. Similar statements have been made about the police too.
Apart from creating the image of a tough top boss, this attack on the bureaucracy is designed to shift the blame from Yogi.
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The BJP has a massive machinery of party cadre, social media and a pliant mainstream media that will make sure, very soon, the public narrative shifts from ‘Yogi is doing nothing’ to ‘Yogi is trying but bureaucracy isn’t working’.
Thereon, the effort will be to showcase development work. There will be new expressways. There will be a big international airport near Noida. There will be a big push for accessible drinking water, making pipelines reach every home. In a year or two, people will start saying Yogi is doing a good job. The man who sounds like the worst chief minister in India today might start looking like one of the best. A lazy, divided and archaic opposition will make sure Yogi succeeds in winning the narrative war, coming across as the best person to lead UP once again in 2022.
Views are personal.