The Big Battle Of Perception

As Uttar Pradesh prepares itself for the assembly polls next year, it will be down to optics. And, the government is going all out to change the way people view the state, harping on its development for all agenda. But will it be enough? THE WEEK takes a long, hard look at the four years of the Yogi Adityanath government

- Puja Awasthi

Of all the questions that physics and philosophy have dealt with the most confounding one is about the nature of the human gaze—never the same for different people. As for mundane everyday objects, so for governments, perceptions vary widely, coloured by experiences and beliefs. As the Uttar Pradesh government led by Yogi Adityanath completes four years in office, it is this challenge of the human gaze it grapples with.

This is a government strongly welded to the image of its leader—a man considered saviour and foe, in equal measure. The good his government has done lies buried beneath the unrelenting criticism of him being intolerant and heavy-handed. But does that cacophony drown out a fair assessment of the last four years? Is there a narrative beyond the obvious?

Let us start with the charge of an unrelenting crime graph. A look at the data from the National Crime Records Bureau shows that in 2017, UP accounted for 12 per cent of all crimes registered under the Indian Penal Code and Special and Local Laws. In 2019, the latest year for which this data is available, this share was 12.2 per cent. As for crimes against women, on just one of the most heinous parameters—rape— the crime rate (per lakh population) in 2017 was 4; in 2019 it was 2.8. There were 8,990 cases of rioting in 2017, of which 34 were communal and 14 sectarian; it came down to 5,714 cases in 2019, none of them communal or sectarian. But here is the catch—the report is a collection of figures that emanate from records provided by the governments of the respective state or Union territory.