Rajeev Yadav was a teenage documentary maker in the late 2000s when he filmed a prominent Hindu monk in northern India making fiery speeches to roaring applause by crowds of followers.

The saffron-clad monk, Yogi Adityanath, has gone on to become chief minister of Uttar Pradesh.

Yadav, 35, is running as an independent candidate in the state ballot, campaigning against what he calls the “politics of hate”.

The issue has been central to Indian politics since Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP stormed to power in 2014 and increased its majority five years later.

Communal tensions have spilled into violence in recent years, including in Uttar Pradesh which has a large Muslim population.

“Activism alone is no longer enough,” said Yadav, sitting on the roof of a mud and brick home overlooking paddy fields in his hometown of Azamgarh.

Yadav’s group, Rihai Manch or Platform for Liberation is best known for providing legal aid to Muslims, who make up some 14 per cent of the population nationwide, and Dalits.

In 2019, during nationwide protests against a citizenship law that Muslims said discriminated against them, the group said that two of its members were arrested by police.

The state police chief told reporters at the time that Rihai Manch had incited violence during protests, something it denies. UN human rights representatives condemned the arrests and alleged assault of hundreds of protesters and activists.

For Yadav the election is an opportunity to provide an alternative to Adiyanath, who supporters on the Hindu right and some political analysts see as a potential successor to Modi.

“It is not just Muslims, there are the downtrodden, the backward castes, who are also being oppressed by this government,” said Yadav.

Yadav has long been a thorn in Adityanath’s side. When Adityanath became chief minister in 2017, television news channels aired clips from incendiary speeches he had made in the late 2000s and which had been filmed by Yadav.

Those videos form part of the evidence in a long-running hate speech case against Adityanath that is at the Supreme Court.

In one of the videos filmed in the eastern town of Gorakhpur in 2007 and aired on multiple TV channels later, Adityanath appears to condone violence in response to the death of a Hindu boy. Deadly communal riots broke out in the city after the remarks.

“The language he was using was the most extreme form of Hindu nationalism we had heard,” said Yadav.

BJP officials and Adityanath representatives did not respond to requests for comment on the footage.