The chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and the prime minister had declared that UP is far safer for women than earlier since the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power. Then government records must be wrong. While rapes of Dalit women dropped by 6.2 per cent across India, in UP they rose by 3.4 per cent between 2019 and 2020; in 2017, when the present chief minister was anointed, they rose by 13.6 per cent. Most recently, two minor Dalit sisters were raped and murdered close to their home, openly enough for some villagers to have seen the girls with the men who allegedly killed them later. Six men have been arrested: this alacrity must be a sign of the improved law and order situation that the prime minister and the chief minister have been harping on. It cannot have anything to do with the fact that five of the men are from the minority community. It is a pity that the state’s credentials regarding even-handed law enforcement looked suspect in the aftermath of the gang rape and murder of the Dalit girl in Hathras. It does not improve matters that UP is, according to the records of the National Human Rights Commission, a hub of crimes against minority groups. That one of the alleged perpetrators from the minority community in Lakhimpur was reported to have been wounded in an encounter during arrest may also have revived memories of ‘encounters’ encouraged by the chief minister to punish supposed criminals. The problem with an administration that defiantly cultivates lawlessness to ‘impose’ the law is that the true criminal can always claim to be an innocent victim of hatred.

Even the staunchest claimants of UP as an idyllic state for women and minority communities may find it difficult to brush off the high — and increasing — rate of crimes against these groups in the state as pure coincidence. Crimes of caste, community and gender define precisely the balance of power desired by the genre of Hindutva represented by the present UP government. It is of the same kind as was exhibited in the remitted sentences of Bilkis Bano’s violators and the murderers of her family and child. Was that meant to be a reassurance for rapists and murderers such as those of Lakhimpur Kheri?