Angry villagers mill around with pieces of their patta (land allotment paper). The refrain among them is: “Yogi-Modi ne hum logon ko barbad kar diya; iss baar chhodengein nahin (Yogi and Modi have destroyed us; we will not spare them this time).”

This is Nagaria-Lodha village, site of the proposed Raja Mahendra Pratap Singh State University in the Iglas Assembly constituency of Aligarh district where voting is scheduled on February 10. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had laid the foundation stone for the university on September 14 last year.

The village is a 45-minute drive from Aligarh town, first along the Khair bypass and then down a single-lane, winding road. At the site of the proposed varsity, you can see a plaque inscribed with Modi’s name, workers with spades and shovels, and a makeshift office of Ishwar Singh and Associates, the construction company hired by the Yogi Adityanath government.

“Work is progressing fast. It will be completed by March 23,” said Karan Singh, quality control engineer with the agency. But Tilak Singh, 30, a Nagaria-Lodha villager, was sceptical.

“The work began barely two months before the announcement of the polls. It will stop after the elections are over,” he said. “If Yogi retains power, he and Modi will resume the work again ahead of the 2024 (general) election. And if (Samajwadi Party president) Akhilesh Yadav comes to power, he will reassess the project.”

The 20-odd villagers gathered with pattas were mostly from the Jatav (Dalit) community and Other Backward Classes. The government has cancelled the pattas of as many as 106 Dalit and OBC farmers to acquire 92 acres of land for the proposed university.

The records say the landless people of the region had been allotted two to three acres of land and given pattas in 1975 under a poverty alleviation programme of the then Indira Gandhi government.

The villagers say the Aligarh administration forcibly destroyed their paddy crops last September to enable Modi to carry out the foundation ceremony, but paid them nothing.

“Both Yogi and Modi promised we would be compensated for the loss of crops and land. But none of us has so far been given any compensation,” said Dinesh Kumar Kashyap, an OBC.

Name games
You are thought “naïve” in Aligarh if you ask about “Harigarh”, the new name for the district that local authorities have proposed. “What! It’s Aligarh. We don’t know about any Harigarh. Adityanath uses ‘Harigarh’ in his speeches but we have nothing to do with it,” said Harendra, manager of the Utsav Residency Hotel where this correspondent checked in.

The Adityanath government has shown a penchant for renaming places with “Muslim” names such as Allahabad (now Prayagraj) and Mughal Sarai (now Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyay Nagar). Local observers believe that the proposed renaming of Aligarh is aimed at widening the divide between Hindus and Muslims, who make up 30 to 40 per cent of the region’s population.

They say the university project too reflects a BJP programme to strengthen its Hindutva project by co-opting Raja Mahendra Pratap Singh (1886-1979), late Jat leader and freedom fighter, and pitting his legacy against that of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, founder of the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU). Western Uttar Pradesh has a sizeable Jat population.

Ironically, Mahendra Pratap was an alumnus of AMU and his father, Raja Ghanshyam, was a friend of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan. Ghanshyam had donated Rs 250 to Sir Syed to build the institution that later evolved into AMU, and left son Mahendra under his tutelage.

“Mahendra Pratap grew up under the tutelage of Sir Syed and became a great freedom fighter and revolutionary,” said Mohammad Sajjad, professor of modern history at AMU who has authored research papers on Mahendra Pratap. “Mahendra Pratap and many other revolutionaries from AMU ran a ‘government in exile’ from Kabul and elsewhere against British rule in India.

Syed Mehmood, also an AMU alumnus, and others in the group were greatly influenced by Mahatma Gandhi’s fight against racial discrimination in South Africa. All through the freedom struggle, AMU was at the centre of the nationalist movement.”

Aquib Khursheed, a PhD scholar of geology at AMU, explained the circumstances in which the Raja Mahendra University was conceived. “Satish Gautam, the BJP politician elected MP from Aligarh in 2014 and 2019, began saying AMU should celebrate Mahendra Pratap’s birthday because it came up on land donated by his father — which is false,” Khursheed said.

A plaque inscribed with Narendra Modi’s name at the site of the proposed Raja Mahendra University whose foundation the Prime Minister laid on September 14, 2021 The Telegraph Picture

“Other RSS wings — the Bajrang Dal and the ABVP — began clamouring for AMU to be renamed as Raja Mahendra University. They held dharnas and demonstrations against AMU.”

Khursheed added: “Who can oppose the launch of a university in the name of Raja Mahendra? Good universities will lessen the load on AMU, JNU and DU (Delhi University). But why should the government target one university to open another?”

The land record of Amit Kumar, a Nagaria-Lodha resident The Telegraph Picture

Sajjad and many scholars at AMU told The Telegraph that the Hindu Mahasabha had begun a graffiti campaign for renaming Aligarh in the 1960s and 1970s. But this was dismissed as an act by “fringe elements”.

“They (RSS-BJP) leaders began targeting AMU in an intense manner after the formation of the Narendra Modi government (in 2014),” Nohid Khan, another PhD scholar of geology at AMU, said.

“ABVP activists launched protests demanding removal of the picture of Mohammad Ali Jinnah from the rows of portraits of luminaries (at the students’ union hall). During the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, police barged into AMU hostels, beat students and framed many in false cases. All these actions were aimed at communalising the atmosphere for electoral gains.”

The politics of aggressive Hindutva paid off for the BJP in successive elections since 2014. But if Lodha-Nagaria is representative of the popular mood in the 58 western Uttar Pradesh constituencies that vote on Thursday, the BJP will face a challenge repeating its successes of 2014, 2017 and 2019 from the region.

“We voted for them in 2017 and 2019. We thought that Modi would give us jobs. Lekin Modi-Yogi hamare pet par laat mar diya. Jamin chhin liya aur bulldozer chala diya (But Modi and Yogi have robbed us of our livelihood, usurped our land and bulldozed us),” said Sukhram, 50.