On March 25, Yogi Adityanath—a saffron-clad monk from the right-wing, Hindu-fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party—was sworn in for a second term as chief minister of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. For two hours that morning, temple bells rang at ceremonies organized across the state to mark the occasion. It was in keeping with the image that Adityanath has sought to project: heir to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and a leading figure in the BJP’s attempt to turn India into a Hindu nationalist state.
Adityanath’s victory was a remarkable feat. He is the state’s first chief minister to win reelection in the past 30 years, and he did so despite his government’s disastrous mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The state has a large and underreported pandemic death rate, and for weeks, bodies floated down the Ganges River. Patients struggled to cope with insufficient hospital beds and oxygen scarcities. But the BJP nonetheless captured 255 of the 403 seats in the state legislature, a margin that exceeded even its own expectations.
