Hello everyone! I would like to thank Omar Sb for providing me this platform. Some of you may know me as the guest poster at BP or as @Saiarav on X. One of my earliest posts on BP was on Yogi’s economic track record – an unflattering take which got me a fair bit of grief from Yogi supporters on X. But fact is, I am not really a Yogi hater – I just went where the economic data led me. I am actually modestly constructive about Yogi. He has got a herculean task on his hands, turning around a mammoth state (UP would be the 5th or 6th most populous country if it was an independent country) which has a historic record of being terribly governed. In my now suspended avatar on X , I had written about Yogi government’s phenomenal performance in dramatically changing the educational outcomes in government schools – a highly critical area which has scarcely received any attention, as his supporters obsess over more “sexy” issues like infrastructure & economy and law & order. As I keep pointing out, Yogi’s record on economy is highly overrated. What about law & order? Is the hype justified? The data on crime appears to suggest that Yogi has indeed brought in significant improvement to L&O in the state and especially has been extremely effective in clamping down on riots, which has traditionally been a major bane in the communally charged polity of UP.
(I plan to do a follow up post on Yogi’s economic record and Yogi’s performance in the education sector, but that is for a later day)
UP, of course has the image of being a lawless badland swarming with bahubalis of dominant communities, with the writ of the State being quite tenuous. The general perception among political watchers is that the Samajwadi Party is especially terrible at enforcing the law whereas the Dailt CM, Mayawati is seen as relatively better. Yogi supporters have, for long claimed that, he has totally transformed the L&O situation in the state with his tough-on-crime policies and zero tolerance for bahubalis. There is obviously an element of exaggeration in this narrative considering UP BJP itself houses bahubalis. So what does data say about how much the situation has changed on the ground since Yogi took over as CM in 2017?
I look at the data on crimes from the National Crime Records Bureau’s annual reports for some clues. I pick the data for the last year of governance by Maywati (2011) and Akhilesh (2016) to assess their record as CM for 5 years. For Yogi, I look at the change in crime levels between 2017 and 2023 (the latest year for which data is available). Admittedly, the analysis is seriously constrained by the high degree of under-reporting of serious crimes with the scale of under-reporting varying significantly over time. Take cases of kidnapping, for example. Up reported only 3,318 cases of kidnapping during calendar year 2006. By 2011, the last year of Mayawati’s rule, that figure had jumped to 8,500 and by 2016, the figure had moved up to ~16,000. Clearly, a case of improving reporting of kidnapping rather a 5x increase in kidnapping over a 10 year period. I therefore focus on some specific categories of violent crime, where arguably, there is lesser scope for underreporting. Continue reading The hype over Yogi’s L&O record is justified