Even priests and pundits, sadhus and yogis can get drunk - drunk with the cocktail of religion, politics and stupidity. That was what we recently witnessed in Yogi's UP. The order that was dictated by Yogi's dispensation was cathartic and confounding. That the shopkeepers along the Hindu Kawad yatra's pilgrim route had to display their religious identity! It was a monstrous idea bordering on madness to expose Muslim traders so that the pilgrims would boycott the Muslim shops.

Thank God, the nation-wide protest against it alerted the Supreme Court to ask Yogi and his cohorts not to play with fire. It should be noted that such maniacal order was meant to be one among many such subtle and sinister moves in the run up to the making of the Hindu Rashtra.

Even after the recent electoral thrashing the Rashtrawadis received, their zeal for destroying the democratic foundations of the nation has not diminished. They are at it and they will be at it, given the trend of their ideology and the direction of their moves.

The general public would not so much expect religious priests and pundits to dabble in party politics. It is a different world altogether. But, Yogi Adityanath, mahant (head priest) of Gorakhnath Matt, chose to plunge headlong into politics, not for the fun of it, but with the Hindu Rashtravadi agenda in mind. The fifty-two-year-old Ajay Mohan Singh Bisht, alias Yogi Adityanath, the Indian monk turned politician, enjoys courting controversies. History will remember him as the henchman who presided over the Hindu-Muslim divide and turned it into a deep chasm.

He has been engineering to make the state of Uttar Pradesh a laboratory of Muslim baiting and minority thrashing. Priding himself as the longest serving chief minister of Uttar Pradesh with two consecutive terms, he has been demonstrating his penchant for singling out Muslims to deal a hammer blow on them at every kerb. For example, in 2017, during India's Independence Day celebrations, he ordered Muslim religious schools to provide video evidence of their students singing the national anthem. Critics have pointed out that the chief minister had lowered himself and stooped too low by slighting the Muslim community by saying that it is not patriotic.

Critics also point out that he scattered the sense of justice and fair play to the four winds by ordering the withdrawal of 2000 cases, including those against himself and his party colleagues. Giving unfettered freedom to vigilante anti-Romeo groups and cow vigilantes-turned lynching mobs, closure of tanneries and slaughter houses, and using bulldozers to pull down Muslim residences and shops were all agenda-based. Surprisingly, the beef exporting factories owned by Hindus were not touched.

Records tell us that, within a period of five years (2017-2022), there were 138 cases of prosecution of journalists registered under the Yogi regime, thereby indicating the strangling of press freedom. The High Court called his government's action "shameless and unwarranted interference in privacy" when the Yogi government ordered the putting up of hoardings with names, addresses and photographs of protestors against the Citizenship Amendment Act.

In an interview with the BBC, Yogi stated that the Muslims, who stayed back in India on India's partition, did no good to India. A statement many considered as bordering on visceral hate speech even as UP has a quarter of India's Muslims. No wonder, during the protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act, Muslim houses and vehicles were vandalised even by policemen and hooligans and thousands of Muslim men and women were arrested or detained.

Yogi founded the Hindu Yuva Vahini (HYV), or Vehicle for Hindu Youth, registered as a cultural organisation but functioning as a Hindu nationalist militia to counter the Muslims and cause sectarian riots. Known as 'controversy's favourite child', the saffron-clad politician uses his fiery oratorical skill to keep the communal cauldron boiling. He was a star campaigner for the construction of Ram Temple in Ayodhya, which, within a year, was found leaking.

He has been described as a turbulent priest, anti-Muslim firebrand, and saffron-robed politician monk whose hatred for minority communities is proverbial. This is not a good characteristic for an honest politician and not a feather in the cap of a monk-turned-politician. What is expected of any priest is to invoke benediction on all people, irrespective of caste, community or creed, as he is to act as mediator between God and God's children.

All human beings are God's children, whether they belong to one religion or another. Religions are but man-made entities, and often, with the barriers they create or hate walls they erect, they become stumbling blocks and prevent their devotees from receiving God's benediction. Especially when priests and pujaris dabble in murky politics, the citizens are made victims of their misdeeds.

In a democratic and secular nation, there should be a law to ban priests, pundits, pujaris or maulvis from entering politics.