The Fall of the Yogi: How Modi’s India Turned Faith Into Fascism

 

The Fall of the Yogi: How Modi’s India Turned Faith Into Fascism

Hindi Version: https://rakeshinsightfulgaze.blogspot.com/2025/10/blog-post_17.html

On October 2, 2025, Hari Om Valmiki, a 38-year-old Dalit man from Rae Bareli, was lynched by a mob who accused him of stealing a drone. He wasn’t carrying one. There was no evidence, just rumors, caste hatred, and a deadly mob that beat him to death in broad daylight. But the horror didn’t end with his murder; it escalated with the state’s response. Rather than deliver justice, the Uttar Pradesh government locked down Hari Om’s grieving family. Police surrounded their home, dictated who they could and couldn’t meet, and pressured them to record a video discouraging visits from political leaders. When Rahul Gandhi defied the blockade and went to meet the family, they clung to him in tears. They wept not for the cameras, but because someone in power finally listened. Someone finally stood with them. That moment shattered the carefully staged image of order and control. It exposed a regime that fears compassion more than it fears crime.

And perhaps most revealing was who they tried to stop: Rahul Gandhi. His presence alone was treated like a threat. The Uttar Pradesh administration didn’t just fear protests or political speeches; they feared a hug, a tear, a moment of truth breaking through their PR machinery. Because these days, just the mention of Rahul Gandhi brings visible panic to the BJP leadership. He doesn’t need to shout. He doesn’t need to smear. His power lies in the contrast of simply showing up where the BJP refuses to go. That is why the state barricades grieving families when he comes. That is why Narendra Modi repeatedly skips parliamentary sessions when Rahul is present. This isn’t political rivalry. It’s the fear of a man who walks calmly through the wreckage they’ve left behind and forces the nation to look at it.

This is what Uttar Pradesh has become under Adityanath’s rule: a state where brutality is covered with silence, where the oppressed are isolated, and where the powerful are shielded. And this is exactly why Adityanath no longer deserves to be called a Yogi. That title carries a moral weight one rooted in compassion, restraint, and service. It implies wisdom, not vengeance. Peace, not propaganda. He has betrayed every part of it.

Adityanath has made a mockery of justice. Under his rule, extrajudicial killings have been normalized, even celebrated. Since 2017, nearly 15,000 police operations have been carried out across Uttar Pradesh, resulting in over 30,000 arrests, 9,467 civilians shot and injured, and 238 killed in so-called police encounters. The official justification is always the same: the accused were criminals, they tried to escape, they fired first. But there is no accountability, no trials, no cross-examination of these claims. According to the NHRC, over 236 people have been killed in encounters with zero prosecutions. The state decides who deserves justice and who deserves death, and the public is told to clap. One of the most recent examples involved a man named Mohd Shahzad, alias “Nikki,” accused of rape. Before any trial could begin, he was hunted down and shot in a forest by police. Maybe he was guilty. But guilt is not proven by a bullet. In a democracy, justice isn’t carried out at gunpoint by state agents. It is earned, proven, and upheld in courts. What Adityanath has done is replace the rule of law with the rule of vengeance.

But not everyone is treated the same in his Uttar Pradesh. When the accused are poor, Muslim, or Dalit, the system is swift, brutal, and unforgiving. But when upper-caste men rape and burn a Dalit girl alive, like in the 2020 Hathras case, the police burn her body in the dark of night and lock her family in their home. When a Dalit man is lynched in 2025, his killers get protection, and his family gets isolation. Justice in this state is caste-coded and politically calculated. The law does not serve the people it serves the powerful.

And Adityanath has built his political brand on this double standard. He was not born a Yogi. He was made one by the RSS, molded into a saffron-clad enforcer marketed as a holy man with a bulldozer. He promised to rid the state of crime, but what he delivered was selective state violence. His policies bulldoze homes of the poor without due process. His police operate as an execution squad. And his government treats grief as a threat when it doesn’t suit their propaganda.

All of this didn’t happen in a vacuum. This is the byproduct of Modi’s India an India where nationalism is used to silence truth, where dissent is equated with treason, and where justice is negotiable if you're rich or well-connected. Modi, Shah, and Adityanath have turned fear into a governance model. While the poor are crushed, public money disappears into the coffers of the connected. Institutions are compromised. Investigative agencies are used as weapons. The media is muzzled. Meanwhile, the regime sells itself as the savior of the nation, as long as people stay distracted by religion, Pakistan, or imagined threats. This is not reform. This is rot dressed in saffron.

And now that fear is catching up with them. The lies don’t land the same way. The smears don’t stick. Because the people are watching who stands beside them when they're broken and who sends bulldozers instead. The BJP built a machine powered by division and distraction. But they never planned for what would happen when someone like Rahul Gandhi simply stood in silence with the victims they tried to erase. They fear him because he reminds the nation of everything they abandoned: empathy, justice, and courage.

He is Adityanath, the enforcer of a corrupt regime. The title of Yogi no longer belongs to him. It never did.