Why Yogi Adityanath needs to keep Hindu Yuva Vahini in check

By Sharat Pradhan

In 2002, when Yogi Adityanath founded the Hindu Yuva Vahini (HYV), he could not have imagined that a decade and a half later his own brainchild would become a cause for worry.

No sooner than he become the first ever saffron-clad chief minister of Uttar Pradesh in March 2017, the HYV went on an overdrive. The “private saffron army”, as some in the state refer to it, began to be seen at the forefront of all that was going wrong in the state. From alleged gangrapes to lynchings to assaults, the HYV has periodically been accused of taking the law into its own hands.

The 45-year-old CM sent word to his lieutenants to lay off. When that didn’t work, he ordered the arrest of two Vahini activists who had stormed a police station and demanded the withdrawal of a case of alleged gangrape against an HYV volunteer. Besides the police, the duo had also challenged a prominent local BJP leader.

Earlier, Vahini’s Meerut district chief Narendra Tomar had barged into a private residence to thrash a young Muslim for being allegedly seen in the company of a Hindu girl. Accusing the boy of “intending to convert the girl by trapping her into a love affair”, the Vahini leader chose to turn a prosecutor and judge himself. While the girl was handed over to her family, the local cops booked the young boy for “committing obscene acts in a public place.”

In yet another incident, Vahini toughs intimidated a group of foreigners, who had driven down from Nepal and halted at a church in Maharajganj.

They sought to accuse the foreign tourists returning from Nepal after visiting the famous Buddhist centre at Lumbini of conspiring to “convert” some Hindus in the church. In the absence of any evidence the police allowed the foreigners to go.

Against such a backdrop, Adityanath felt the need for some drastic steps to drive home his point. For instance, he summoned a recently-appointed Vahini convener from the HYV headquarters in Gorakhpur to Lucknow for a dressing down. “You all are giving a bad name to my government; I will not spare any one of you if you dare take law into your hands,” the CM thundered, according to eyewitnesses present.

Since then, the Vahini and its activists have been lying low. But taming a tiger is no mean task.

The writer is a Lucknow based journalist