How Adityanath’s police raj is backfiring on the BJP in Uttar Pradesh

In September, an unusual scene played out in Naugarh, a town in Uttar Pradesh’s Siddharth Nagar district.

Vinay Verma, a legislator from the Apna Dal (Soneylal) party – an ally of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party – sat on a public protest against his own government.

He said he resorted to the demonstration to force the police to act.

“The sand mafia in my constituency murdered a boy from the Chamar community last month, but the police have refused to nab the culprits,” Verma told Scroll. “The mafia is in cahoots with police officials.”

Verma said he wanted the superintendent of police transferred out of the district, along with the station house officers of three police stations in his constituency, Shohratgarh. “The superintendent of police has sold out the police stations.”

Nearly 50 protesters sat with Verma. Some were party workers, but others were citizens with similar problems. One had his bike stolen, another was assaulted by thugs who robbed his home, and a third had his relative’s jewellery snatched in broad daylight.

“There is no redressal from the police,” said Manoj Soni, 32, a protester whose sister-in-law had been robbed in July, but the police investigation into it had been dormant for months. “Nothing moves in the police stations until you pay a hefty bribe. I paid Rs 20,000, yet no one has been caught.”

It was Verma, the MLA, who seemed most helpless. “Iss sarkar mein vidhayak ki koi garima nahi bachhi hai,” he said. In this government, MLAs have no respect.

Verma said he had raised the matter with Chief Minister Adityanath during a meeting in August. “But [a senior police official] told him that the police had filed a case and nabbed the culprits – an absolute lie,” Verma went on. “No one has been caught so far. The officials are misleading the chief minister.”

He called off his protest after a week. No police officer was transferred.

A police raj

Uttar Pradesh is ruled by Adityanath, who has, over nearly two terms as chief minister, fashioned for himself an image of a muscular, divisive Hindutva leader.

Central to that perception is a style of governance that relies excessively on bureaucrats and police officials. Since the beginning of his tenure in 2017, he has been feted as an efficient administrator who purportedly improved law and order, albeit through questionable methods.

The BJP cadre has cheered on Adityanath’s heavy-handed policies that disregard due process, like the police encounters of alleged criminals, and the wholesale demolition of properties that target Muslims and other marginalised groups.

Seven years on, however, the high concentration of power among state officials – especially the police – is turning into a problem for the Bharatiya Janata Party and its workers.

It is not only allies like Apna Dal who are unhappy. Vinay Verma, for example, claimed that several MLAs from the Bharatiya Janata Party called him to lend support. “They will not do it openly because they are scared,” he said. “The way state officials are behaving in UP, it will damage our party and our allies.”

Some would argue that the damage is already done.

In the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party performed badly in this politically crucial state. Of the 63 seats it lost across India, 30 were in Uttar Pradesh. As a result, the BJP could not secure a majority in Parliament and had to rely on a coalition of allies to form a government.

The Lok Sabha results not just punctured BJP’s ambition of winning 400 seats, but also underlined the crisis in the party in UP.

As I travelled from Siddharth Nagar to Prayagraj, it was evident that BJP workers in Uttar Pradesh are angry and exasperated. They accuse the Adityanath government of not paying heed to them, rendering the government and the party high command out of touch with changing ground realities.

Adityanath has diminished the workers’ influence in government bodies, they say, hampering their ability to address voter grievances and canvass for the party.

This dysfunction threatens the party’s prospects in the upcoming bypolls in 10 Assembly seats, and, more importantly, in the 2027 state elections.

The cadre’s frustration has come up earlier. MLAs and MPs of the party have publicly expressed anger at the police as far back as 2020. In May 2022, six BJP workers were arrested in Meerut for protesting outside a police station with a poster that said, “BJP workers are not allowed to enter the police station”.

Most BJP workers interviewed for this story contrasted the state of their party to the rival Samajwadi Party during the Akhilesh Yadav government. “When Akhilesh was chief minister, Samajwadi Party workers could barge into a police station and hold an SHO [station house officer] by his collar,” recalled Dharmraj Gond, a BJP functionary in Jaitpur, a small highway town 10 kilometres outside Gorakhpur. “But if a BJP worker, who is always more disciplined, goes to the thana to simply help a voter, the officer will harass the worker.”

‘Tremendous corruption’

Police corruption is not a new phenomenon. But voters and BJP functionaries say that it has increased manifold under the Adityanath government. “If one paid Rs 1,000 before, one has to pay Rs 10,000 now,” said Gond.

Manoj Mishra, the district vice-president of the BJP in Ambedkar Nagar district, admitted that there is “tremendous corruption” in police stations that the party is not able to rein in.

“Bribery is rampant. Nothing moves till you pay,” alleged Amit Prajapati, a 24-year-old BJP worker in the district.

Backward caste voters in the district were especially unhappy about corruption in police stations, he added. “But what makes voters angrier is that if they come to the BJP office for help, they don’t get any.”

He went on to explain: “Even if the local leadership here calls the SHO to get some work done, they only manage to say ‘aap dekh lijiye’, which gets nothing done.”

The anger among the backward caste voters is a worry for the coming bypoll in Katehari Assembly constituency, admit BJP leaders.

“A few days ago, a man from a village of Rajbhars in Katehari was wrongly charged under the SC ST Act by the police,” said Mishra.

Rajbhars are officially categorised as Other Backward Classes, but seen as ati pichada, or among the extremely backward classes – a group that the BJP has cultivated for nearly a decade. “We tried to get the police to drop the charges. But they want Rs 25,000 to drop the case,” Mishra said. “The man is very poor and cannot pay up. There are 300-350 Rajbhar voters in that village. If the charges remain, none of them will vote for us in the bypolls.”

Powerless under Adityanath

Party workers now have little power, said Manuj Kumar Laloriya, as the BJP “only wants veteran workers to go around sticking posters”.

A younger generation of workers recalls Laloriya as a popular crusader karyakarta of the Bharatiya Janata Party in Prayagraj, who would not shy away from taking on bigger Congress leaders.

But those days seem long gone. Now, like many workers, his influence is waning.

For example, during our interview, a woman came to Laloriya’s home to seek help. Her husband had deserted her, and her in-laws had driven her out of their home. The woman went to the police to register an FIR, with no success. Even Laloriya proved to be of little assistance.

He huffed and puffed about pullings strings to set the police officials straight, and name-dropped lawyers who could help him do it, but in the end, sent away the woman with an odd and ineffectual advice: “Chant radhe-radhe twice a day and all your problems will melt away.”

Workers of the BJP’s allies, like the Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party, the Nishad Party and the Apna Dal (Soneylal), too, told Scroll that they were as powerless under the Adityanath government as the BJP workers.

Ironically, even the main Opposition party seemed unhappy about the state of the saffron cadre.

Mahendra Yadav, a Samajwadi Party functionary in Ambedkar Nagar, is on friendly terms with local BJP office bearers. “Our party’s workers also go to the BJP district president, Triyambak Tiwari, for help in police matters,” he said.“But the SHOs in three police stations here don’t even answer Tiwariji’s phone calls. Privately, BJP workers joke that they wish the Samajwadi Party forms a government so that these policewalas are cut down to size.”

Losing grip

“The problem with Yogiji is that he is not receptive to feedback,” said Gond, the the president of the Bharatiya Janata Party in Piprauli block in Gorakhpur district. “He will listen to adhikaris, but not his own karyakartas.”

The consequence, he added, was that the BJP was losing support on the ground in UP.

What made it worse, Gond went on, was that not even MLAs and MLCs were able to elevate complaints of ordinary citizens to the CM. “They fear that Yogiji will scold them for complaining all the time,” he said. “But look at the state of things. There are hardly any vacancies for government jobs. When they open up, the exam papers get leaked. The bureaucrats in-charge have no fear that they will be punished by the administration.”

Adityanath’s politics of Hindutva is potent, but Gond believes the monk needs to do more. “Yogiji is a Hindu Hriday Samrat” – the emperor of Hindu hearts – “but voters ask till when will they vote over faith and temples? They want vikas.”

Voter anger

In the Katehari Assembly seat, ordinary people too spoke at length about the arbitrary tyranny of police officials and local bureaucrats.

One of them was Acche Lal Rajbhar, 52. A few days before Chief Minister Adityanath’s visit, local officials came to inspect the road abutting his plot of land.

“Yogiji was going to come and weed had overgrown around the road,” said Rajbhar. “The district magistrate sent a JCB to deal with it. They removed the weed and just dumped it into my field.”

That flattened about 200 square metres of crops – a serious loss for Rajbhar, who tilled the land as a tenant. “How can they do this?” he asked, exasperated. “The crops were only a month away from harvest.”

Other voters complain of widespread corruption and casteism in government institutions, especially police. Some even warned of consequences at the ballot box. “If things go on like this,” said Naugarh resident Amit Pandey, 36, who could not get the police to register an FIR after his home was robbed earlier this year, “then we will give Babaji [Adityanath] a result in 2027 that he will never forget.”

This is the first in a series of reports on the BJP’s crisis in Uttar Pradesh.