Milk Man Yogi Cannot Smell Coffee

There are cow-ambulances to take hurt cattle to hospital. But ‘man’? His daughter gets gang-raped by people linked to a Yogi MLA and allegedly by the MLA, too, and when the poor distraught man raises his voice against the outrage, the MLA’s brothers and goons thrash him black and blue and there is no ambulance to take him to hospital. Instead, he is carted off to the police station and given more of the same treatment – kicks, punches, and rifle-butts. Here’s an analysis, for Different Truths.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath is a self-acknowledged milkman. Cows are the best part of his life. That is why he cannot wake up and smell the coffee. And, now, the question is being asked: Why did Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP President Amit Shah choose to make Yogi CM?

The CM has hardly come up to expectations if there were any. Quite like Modi in Gujarat in 2002, this first-time CM is also showing signs that he lacks the steel to cut the ice, an inability to catch the bull by the horns, the tiger by the tail, show governance skills. Seems like managing a mutt and governing a state are two different cups of tea.

And this CM has a brute majority – 325 MLAs. He could lose 25 of them and not break out in sweat, not lose his slow smile, which at times is so irritating and disconcerting that it takes an amount of will not to hurl the ashtray at the TV set. Glass under the feet is not as painful as that smirk that spells a complete lack of empathy. To be born a cow is so much better in Yogi’s Uttar Pradesh.

At least there are cow-ambulances to take hurt cattle to hospital. But ‘man’? His daughter gets gang-raped by people linked to a Yogi MLA and allegedly by the MLA, too, and when the poor distraught man raises his voice against the outrage, the MLA’s brothers and goons thrash him black and blue and there is no ambulance to take him to hospital. Instead, he is carted off to the police station and given more of the same treatment – kicks, punches and rifle-butts.

And Yogi’s police, the encounter specialists he has given full rein to ice criminals in cold-blood, take the helpless man’s thumbprints on official documents so that that the man can hang himself without help from any Yogi MLA. But that does not happen. In this age of the smartphone, everything is recorded, online or offline. Ask Zuckerberg!

So, there is video-proof, and more: The man dies, doctors find 250ml of ‘pus’ in his stomach and perforations in the intestines besides contusions on his back and legs and feet – black and blue reminders that this man wouldn’t cow down under beatings.

Now, the man is dead, killed, murdered, but the cover-up continues. CM Yogi is still not convinced that his MLA is guilty of the worst crimes a man can commit in this age of ‘Beti Bachao, Beti Pathao’ which PM Modi keeps selling in his weekly ‘Man Ki Baat’.

The gang-rape survivor cannot get away from Yogi-land where the alleged killer MLA’s men are hounding her. On Wednesday, April 11, she was whisked to her home in Makki Village in Unnao because Amit Shah was in Lucknow and she had expressed a wish to confront Shah in Yogi’s den. No chance!

Other family members including the dead man’s ailing mother and brother are “trapped” in Delhi, petrified to take the trip to Makki because the MLA’s family is ‘mafia’ and unless you’ve a great fondness for the ‘pyre’, you do not light a fire under the MLA’s you-know-what.

Not that the Yogi is unaware of what’s happening in his fiefdom, what all happened to the gang-rape survivor and her family. The 18-year-old had tried to immolate herself outside the CM’s residence on Sunday and there are reports that Yogi had given her a sworn promise in 2017 after the gang-rape that the culprits would be brought to book. That promise has so far not been kept and it appears like it won’t be either, ever.

It also looks like neither PM Modi nor Amit Shah are in a hurry to tell CM Yogi to wake up and smell the coffee. April 11, PM Modi told his MPs to travel to their constituencies and ‘ground connect’. It is more than likely that BJP Members of Parliament from UP will not get a whiff of the putrid smell of rape and murder because they will all have only their ears to the ground and not their flaring nostrils, which if they did stick them into the dirt, they would smell the rotten milk that is Yogi Raj in Uttar Pradesh.