In Chillupar, there’s angst over the Adityanath government’s ‘casteist approach’

Both BJP and SP candidates talk of development but the election will be all about caste arithmetic

“ Jahan Brahmin raha wahan sarkar bani (whoever the Brahmin backs forms the government),” thundered Vinay Shankar Tiwari, Brahmin strongman and Samajwadi Party (SP) candidate from Gorakhpur’s Chillupar constituency, weather vane of the community’s angst against what’s perceived in some sections as the Yogi Adityanath government’s casteist approach. Its epicentre is Tanda, the Tiwari family’s native village.

When we met Mr. Vinay Shankar Tiwari, who won in the 2017 Assembly election on a Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) ticket, on Wednesday, a day before Chillupar will vote, he quoted a Puranic tale that says Parshuram presented the Sudarshan Chakra to Lord Krishna. “In this election, Brahmins are offering power to a Yadav to save the State and have no qualms in aligning with Muslims,” said the son of Hari Shankar Tiwari, who became one of the earliest examples of criminalisation of politics in Purvanchal when he won the election from jail in 1985.

Till 2007, Mr. Hari Shankar Tiwari didn’t need a party’s support to get elected and worked as a Cabinet Minister with Mulayam Singh Yadav, Rajnath Singh and Mayawati before he ran out of favour. His juggernaut was stopped by a young Brahmin social worker and journalist, Rajesh Tripathi, in 2007 on a BSP ticket. As age limited his movement, Mr. Hari Shankar Tiwari passed the baton on to his son, Mr. Vinay Shankar Tiwari, who defeated Mr. Rajesh Tripathi, the Brahmin supported by Thakurs of the region, in the previous election in a very close contest.

However, Mr. Vinay Shankar Tiwari’s supporters say the victory irked Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, who targeted the “Brahmin sirmaur” (the pride of Brahmins) as Mr. Vinay Shankar Tiwari is known to his acolytes, just after he came to power. The Thakur-Brahmin tussle in the region is an old story but the cold war between the Gorakhpur mutt, of which Mr. Adityanath, a Thakur, is head priest or mahant, and the hata, as the Tiwaris’ place in Gorakhpur is popularly called, goes back to the 1990s, when Virendra Shahi was gunned down by gangster Shri Prakash Shukla. Both sides accuse each other of a long list of criminal cases whenever they are in power.

“The Chief Minister of the State indulged in Thakurwad,” Mr. Vinay Shankar Tiwari charges. “It’s reflected in the way plum postings were given to officials of one community and how the Bikru episode or the Unchahar and Sitapur massacres were handled. Brahmins have been humiliated. Mr. Adityanath has said that being a Kshatriya is a matter of pride for him. We have accepted that the mahant is going to do casteist politics and politics of revenge.”

His supporters cite instances where Thakur criminals were asked to surrender under police protection while Brahmins who crossed the line faced “encounters”.

Mr. Vinay Shankar Tiwari said the way the CM brought bulldozers into the political narrative in the State, it seemed as if he [Mr. Adityanath] didn’t believe in the judiciary. “Police ‘encounter’ could be an exception, not a State policy. We have decided to take on the BJP in the region,” he said. This found expression in the way the SP fielded Brahmin candidates against the BJP’s prominent Thakur faces in the region, including Mr. Adityanath himself, and Agriculture Minister Surya Pratap Shahi.