Uttar Pradesh: A death, an old case and a crisis for Yogi Adityanath

The death in prison on 11 October of 72-year-old journalist-activist Parvez Parwaz from Gorakhpur is likely to haunt Yogi Adityanath in the coming election season.

The activist had filed a criminal case for hate speech against Adityanath when he was an MP in 2007. Adityanath was arrested and spent 11 days in jail.  On his release on bail, he cried in Parliament while narrating his ‘plight’.

The case remained undecided and in 2017 after Adityanath became chief minister, one of his first acts was to withdraw all cases that were pending against him, including this one—a move that strangely went unchallenged by opposition parties.

Parwaz challenged the decision in court, but the Allahabad High Court, and later Supreme Court, dismissed his plea. The matter took a vicious turn when Parwaz and another person were convicted in 2020 of gangrape by a Gorakhpur court and sentenced to life imprisonment. Parwaz’s death can potentially electrify the poll campaign early next year. He resisted pressure for 10 years to withdraw the case against Yogi Adityanath and paid for his persistence.

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Adityanath’s woes seem to be piling. The row over embezzlement of public donations from the Ram temple at Ayodhya refuses to die down.  Some weeks ago, Divya Mittal, a popular IAS officer, resigned, citing instances of misgovernance, and in a viral video announced her decision to enter public life. She did not detail the harassment she had faced while in service, but she is unlikely to remain silent if she contests elections.

The bulldozer/half-encounter reality of Yogi’s lofty claims of making the state crime-free are also well known. A key ally Sanjay Nishad publicly questioned how Ramesh Bind, associated with the Samajwadi Party, was gunned down earlier this year.

Bind’s family alleges a staged police encounter; the police claim self-defence. UP Police proudly claims to have conducted 15,000 encounters since 2017 leading to the death of 238 ‘criminals’ and 9,467 who were shot in the leg.

In an unusual move, an additional chief judicial magistrate Parvinder Singh, visited Deoband jail to question inmates who had sustained gunshot injuries. Singh’s first-hand video interviews exposed how Supreme Court guidelines on police encounters were being flouted openly.

Retired IG of Police S.R. Darapuri, who has documented extrajudicial killings, alleges that crime rate figures put out by the state government are fabricated. Cases of Dalit atrocities, rape, murder and kidnapping of women have risen sharply, he says. The state’s claim that women were safe was shattered by the gangrape of a minor girl in a public bus.

Former Lucknow University VC Prof. Roop Rekha Verma, says, “Through my NGO ‘Saajhi Duniya’, we have worked to bring justice for women who have been victims of rape; we also fight false cases
against them. To stifle our voices, several NGOs, including mine, are being investigated by the Anti-Terrorist Squad.”

Even after the ad blitz, facts do not support Yogi’s claims that Uttar Pradesh now has a vibrant economy, While Gross State Domestic Product (GSDP) has officially doubled from Rs 12.75 lakh crore in 2016-17 to an estimated Rs 24.99 lakh crore in 2026, the per capita income is only
Rs 94,000, way below the national average of Rs 1.84 lakh. The growth rate is quite uneven with Noida alone accounting for 10 per cent of the state’s economy while many districts in eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bundelkhand contribute less than one per cent each.

Development economist Santosh Mehrotra has frequently critiqued the state’s development model. “During the second investment summit, the Uttar Pradesh government signed MoUs worth Rs 34 lakh crore. But signing an MoU and implementation are two different things,” he says.

Also, the unusually hefty investment in mega projects have failed to kickstart broader, sus-tainable growth. “Most of this expenditure has gone towards building wasteful expressways that few use. Of the 12 airports built in the past five years, six have closed down for lack of demand,” he points out.

While the chief minister talks of employment generation, 90 per cent of the workforce is either self-employed or employed in casual agricultural work or engaged in
low-quality jobs.

Nearly a third of the state’s youth are economically and educationally inactive. According to the National Sample Survey, 33.5 per cent youth aged 15-24 were ‘not in education, employment or training’ compared to the national average of 29.3 per cent. This goes upto to 36.7 per cent for the 15-29 age group, against the national average of 32.9 per cent. Among young women, this is as high as 59.5 per cent.

A potentially lethal combination of controversies, misgovernance, failing law and order and sluggish economic development puts Adityanath in a precarious position ahead of the 2027 assembly elections. And the lavish government spend on advertising may not be quite enough to obscure the ground reality when Yogi Adityanath seeks a return mandate in March next year.