There it is — the ‘foreign hand’. The Uttar Pradesh chief minister has ordered an investigation into what he says is an international plot by groups and individuals overseas to create caste-based conflict in his state. This is the most imaginative defence to have been thought up to discredit the countrywide protests against administrative and police actions to suppress the realities of the alleged gang rape of a Dalit girl in Hathras by upper-caste men and her subsequent death. International conspiracy is an idea for a possible chorus that can be taken up by the Bharatiya Janata Party cadre and repeated ad nauseam in the hope that it can replace facts. Simultaneously, first information reports against protesters and an online site carrying information about protests are being lodged, on charges ranging from sedition and inciting conflict between groups to forgery and cheating as well as unlawful assembly, with arrests in some instances. Evidently, ‘anti-national’ elements, funded by foreigners, and the Opposition are going all out to hurt the image of the Yogi Adityanath government supposedly reputed for its excellent law and order. That is, the protests are contrived and motivated.

Apart from alleged efforts of the authorities to undermine the accusation of rape and the veracity of the family’s accounts, blocking Opposition leaders and members of the media from reaching the girl’s village, too, continued for days. But this showed up the rather low-key responses of the chiefs of the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party to the violence and the attempts to suppress what is being seen as a lethal upper-caste atrocity on a Dalit girl. Although Mayawati heads a Dalit-based party, all she could say was that the UP government should concentrate on ensuring justice for the Dalit family and could rectify its mistake, while rebuking the government for its silence after the family complained of threats by the district magistrate. The former firebrand leader of the party for social justice, Mulayam Singh Yadav, was silent; his son and present leader, Akhilesh Yadav, condemned the erasure of evidence by the cremation of the girl by the police and criticized the government for stopping his party workers from reaching the village. Since both leaders are on their own turf in the state, this is both disheartening and politically enigmatic.