Yogi Adityanath

Yogi Adityanath (born June 5, 1972, Pauri Garhwal, Uttarakhand, India) is a Hindu monk and Indian political leader. He is a prominent member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and is the only politician to have served two full consecutive terms as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, a key electoral state. He is also the mahant, or head priest, of the Gorakhnath Math, a Hindu monastery in Gorakhpur. Adityanath is known for his advocacy of Hindutva and has taken a leading role during election campaigns for the BJP since 2017. His government’s use of excavating machines to demolish allegedly illegal properties has led to the epithet of “bulldozer baba” (baba is a term that can mean “father” and is used to address Hindu ascetics).

Early life and monkhood

Ajay Singh Bisht was born in the village of Panchur in the Garhwal region of Uttarakhand state. The son of a forest ranger, he was one of seven siblings. After completing a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from a university in Uttarakhand, he left home to pursue his religious calling. In the 1990s he joined the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, a campaign by right-wing Hindus to reclaim the site of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, believed to be the birthplace of the Hindu deity Rama. During this time he became a disciple of Yogi Advaityanath, then the mahant of the Gorakhnath Math and one of the leaders of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement.

Decades later, Adityanath was present at the inauguration of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, which represented the conclusion of the long-drawn controversy over the ownership of the Babri Masjid site. On December 6, 1992, the mosque was demolished by a Hindu nationalist mob. In 2019 a Supreme Court ruling awarded the site to Hindus and a separate area to Muslims. The Ram Mandir was constructed by the Narendra Modi-led BJP government and inaugurated in January 2024.

After his initiation as a Hindu monk, Bisht became known as Yogi Adityanath and was eventually promoted to mahant of Goraknath Math after the death of his mentor Advaityanath. Both yogis turned their Hindu nationalist activism into political careers: Advaityanath first became a member of the Hindu Mahasabha, which had developed the concept of Hindutva under the leadership of V.D. Savarkar (1883–1966), and then the BJP; Adityanath joined the BJP after launching a political outfit of his own called the Hindu Yuva Vahini (“Hindu youth army”) in 2002. The Hindu Yuva Vahini was disbanded in 2022.

Political career and role as campaigner

Adityanath was first elected to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian parliament, in 1998 from the constituency of Gorakhpur. He was reelected four more times before vacating his Lok Sabha seat in 2017 to assume the office of chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. A divisive figure due to his firebrand persona, Adityanath was not officially projected as the BJP’s candidate for chief minister ahead of the 2017 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections. His elevation after the result was seen by some as a deliberate strategy by the central BJP leadership to avoid upsetting different groups of supporters and voters of the party.

Adityanath retained the chief minister’s post when the BJP won the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections again in 2022. In doing so, he became the first chief minister of the state to be elected to a second consecutive term after completing a full first term.

After ascending to the office of chief minister, Adityanath became one of the BJP’s most visible faces and a star campaigner for the party during elections. His socially conservative views and communally charged rhetoric spoke to the right-wing electorate. In the assembly polls of 2023, his efforts on behalf of BJP electoral candidates played a crucial part in delivering victories for the party in the states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan.

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“Bulldozer baba”

Since assuming office, Yogi Adityanath has become inextricably linked with bulldozers, both figuratively and otherwise. His government has increasingly used bulldozers as mechanisms to maintain law and order in Uttar Pradesh, deploying them in demolitions of allegedly illegal properties. These have been criticized by some as politically motivated because they allegedly targeted not just local wrongdoers but also activists and opponents of the government.

Over time, Adityanath turned the bulldozer and its associated subtext of aggression into a campaign tool. He embraced the epithet “bulldozer baba,” coined by the local media and used disparagingly by his political opponents, using it to his advantage to enhance his reputation as a strongman. Clad in the saffron robes of a Hindu monk, he cuts a distinctive and dramatic figure riding atop excavating machines at political rallies and invokes bulldozers in speeches and slogans.

Chief ministership

Adityanath has been praised for improving infrastructure and promoting industrial development in Uttar Pradesh. His government is known to be tough on organized crime, with more than 20,000 people arrested. More than 150 suspected offenders are reported to have died in “encounter killings,” extrajudicial killings carried out by Indian armed forces, supposedly in self-defense. His government also banned cow-smuggling, a system of moving cattle for slaughter from states where the practice is illegal to states where it isn’t. (The cow is regarded as sacred in Hinduism.)

Some of his government’s initiatives have been criticized as targeting the state’s Muslim population, such as a law to prevent “love jihad” or religious conversions in the guise of marriage. Since 2018 Adityanath has controversially closed many slaughterhouses in Uttar Pradesh, in turn negatively impacting tanneries, which have lost their sources of raw leather.