 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we are going to talk about the appointment of Yogi Adityanath as the CM of Uttar Pradesh. And to discuss the topic we have with us are editor in chief Prabir Purkayastha. So my first question to you Prabir is appointment of Adityanath as CM of UP. What does it signify? I think this has shocked a lot of people including those who supported Modi in the UP elections. I think they have been shocked because Yogi Adityanath really represents the hard face in Hindutva in the sense that he has been stopped by the election commission for making hate speeches. He has made what by all accounts would be called necrophobic speeches of dead women, various other things that have been said by him are really far beyond what constitutionally even would be considered as reasonable or acceptable speech. It is another matter that we really have never prosecuted people for hate speech the way it should have been. By asking him to be the chief minister, the BJP's make it very clear that they do not consider Muslims as a part of who they think are people of Uttar Pradesh. Of course we saw that but the fact that they didn't put up any Muslim candidate not even a token candidate was put up by BJP. So now they are basically trying to bring in an understanding that we only consider 80% of Indians as Indians, 20% who are Indian citizens or Muslims are outside the pale of our thinking. So I think that's what Adityanath represents and in some sense it is the Gujarat politics now being institutionalized in Uttar Pradesh because this is what happened after the Gujarat riots. Muslims really not only got disenfranchised, they also lost out in various other walks of life. They were squeezed out of their traditional occupations. They were the meat as business, non-vegetarian food as business. These were squeezed in different ways. So there's been a whole economic attack which took place on the Muslims in Gujarat. I think we are likely to see a reputation of that now starting in UP. So what do you think will be the implications on minorities especially Muslims, women and Dalits? Well let's put it this way. Adityanath's views have been absolutely clear. There is no development agenda in his lexical. That's not what he has ever said. It's only now has been being sworn in. He talked about development, sapkavikas and so on but that's never been his plank. Wherever and whenever he has spoken his speech has been divisive. So what we are likely to see is for instance retrogressive bills being passed. The attempt to bring cow slaughter as an offence of different kinds. You could consider it life imprisonment is being talked about. So making cow slaughter an important plank of the state and then using it to attack the Muslims in different ways. See once you say there is this book, law, the statuette, you can actually charge anybody with consuming beef or killing cows. So you can actually try and make all food being eaten by Muslims and say they're really eating beef and then bring them under this. Then transport of cattle or leather which is another business Muslims have been involved with leather tanning. The tanneries in Kanpur for instance run by largely Muslims. All of this now can become criminalized and that's one of the possibilities that that can take place. And this also true for instance Dalits. Dalits are again in the business of either removing fallen animals, harvesting the skins thereof and also converting the skins into leather and again creating footwear out of it or other leather goods out of it. So all of that can be criminalized. Then we have seen also that there is a discomfort in the RSS and the BJP which gets expressed quite often that reservation should be done a little bit. So we are likely to see the start of reservations coming under attack or everybody being given reservations which would also lead almost to the same thing. So these are some of the issues we would start to see and let's also face it that along with it you are also likely to see what Adityanathan company would like the women to be which is they should be in their homes, they should not really come out, they should work, they should be out of the workplace, they should not assert their rights etc etc. So you are also going to see a retrogressive picture of India coming out. It's interesting you know that we differentiated India in 1947 that we are not like Pakistan, we are a secular country. What's today Mr. Modi as a Prime Minister and Earth's twice Chief Minister of Gujarat and Adityanathan to present is how to make India more like Pakistan. So really what one of the poets of Pakistan had said, Bhayminar Riyaz had said, Aptu Hamaraj I say Nikle. So they seem to be more or less on the lines of converting India to a much more retrogressive and much more shall be say oppressive place for all people, not just for minorities, not for Dalits and not for women but for everybody because at the end of it very few people in the country would really agree with Adityanath but he's going to now hold the country to ransom. The whole election campaign was built on the agenda of development like Modi did in 2014 but now that Adityanath is the CM, do you think that agenda will be followed or do you think RSS and their Hindutva agenda will take forward run? You know the way Modi placed the development agenda was that Akhilesh's development agenda was only for the Muslims otherwise everybody agreed that Akhilesh had delivered development to new people, there were roads, there were pensions which went to villages, electricity was available in the villages much more than before so all the developmental normal targets of the state Akhilesh was apparently able to fulfill relatively better than what had been done earlier but the net result was that Modi and the BJP made this as if the development was only of the Muslims so therefore even the development agenda was really commonized, the Khabaristan versus Shrishmashan Ghat those kinds of rhetoric which is really that was really the agenda that he was placing that development has been only for the Muslims we are going to develop everybody it's clear that that target was not really development target was Muslims that they will be effectively disenfranchised that in Indian elections Muslims as a community will have no role in the elections this is what was being sought to be normalized and I think that's the biggest danger similarly the Dalits voted for a majority in large numbers so Modi can now say or Adityanath now can say these two communities don't matter we've got 60% majority of the 60% with us they got 39% votes really but they can say we have got a majority of the 60% with us if we have the majority of the 60% we can run we don't really need anybody else now what kind of development we will see in UP we have to wait and see but it's clear whatever development takes place it is going to be a development which will leave outside its spale these two communities BJP didn't announce their CM candidate before the elections do you think that was part of the strategy it is very difficult to see what the strategy is or you know think into the minds of Mr Modi and the others so I would say from all accounts that this is not a surprising decision they purposely did not want to disclose this before the elections because they thought the liberal reaction the reaction of a number of people who are sort of middle-roaders who might vote for Modi because of the development plank in spite of his communal rhetoric that they would then think no this is real and therefore Modi represents a certain kind of threat to the secular fabric of the country a lot of the people who voted for Modi think that he's a doer he's a go-getter that he might have demonetized the currency note strongly but doesn't matter at least could execute something so there is this aura of a doer that Modi has which people believe then should be supported in the hope that India will have a better future I think they a lot of them would have felt that no if Aditya Nath is going to be the chief minister that that is not what would happen so I think that was the reason they did not really declare his name beforehand but in essence it does not seem to me that this was something which was not calculated beforehand and also they were talking about different OBC sections being given a part of the pie and therefore not to declare a Thakur Apakash chief minister could also be a way of keeping certain OBC section with them so we still have two years almost two years of Modi government and now five years of Aditya Nath government do you think communal is resistance to communalism will build up in our country I think the three kinds of resistance we need one is the secular democratic resistance which has to be built because this is not simply another political party it's really an attack on what this country stood for in 1947 when we had independence a secular democratic republic how secular how democratic we can still discuss but there's no question the intent of the people and the intent of the leadership at that point of time was to build a secular democratic nation so that's one which needs to be protected at the whole bunch of people who may not agree with this or that political party but they will agree with the secular democratic content of a politics who need to be brought together second is a very important part is a cultural resistance that what we are seeing is not just simply attack on politics it's not an attack on the constitution but it's an attack on the way we live the way we want to express ourselves what we eat what we wear what we can do what women can do what Dalits positions in society should be that they are full citizens of this country and cannot be oppressed anymore so all those assertions are going to be under attack so we need a cultural resistance to be built up which unites people and of course overall we need the political resistance to be built up irrespective of the agenda we may have to protect these values and bring everybody together I I do not think India can be turned into a kind of shall we say Hindutva fortress as Mr. Adityanath or other communal figures would like it to be I don't think hate can win for long and therefore I do believe the resistance is going to spring up whether it leads to a different results in 2019 we have to see but I do not think this can go on forever this is an unstable short-term victory which cannot be sustained this is all the time we have today at newsleth thank you so much for joining us