Yogakshema and Antyodaya in practice: Assessing UP’s governance shift under Yogi Adityanath

Governance is not only the management of a territory. It is the consecration of power into the service of the people. That conviction is ancient in India. Kautilya stated it in the Arthasastra with the economy of a practitioner through prajasukhe sukham rajñah-in the happiness of the subject lies the happiness of the king. The Mahabharata’s Santi Parva pressed it further: the king does not rest while his subjects suffer. That two minds working from such opposite stations, one from a functioning court and one from the wreckage of Kurukshetra, arrived at the same conclusion about sovereignty is the settled civilisational verdict of Bharata. The condition of the weakest citizen is the only honest measure of those who govern.

Uttar Pradesh in 2017 was, by that measure, a failing state. The administrative degeneration of the preceding decades was real, structural and cumulative. Organised crime had fashioned a parallel sovereign order under state patronage. Dynastic absolutism had converted public institutions into instruments of private extraction. The state’s share in national life had contracted economically, socially and in terms of basic security. The BIMARU designation was not only a demographic label. It was a verdict delivered by the state’s own record. The commentariat that affixed it across three decades has since conspicuously refused to read the acquittal. Their silence in the face of transformation is, in its own way, testimony enough. The change which occurred in 2017 was not a transfer of power in the routine sense. It was the recovery of Yogakshema as a governing obligation. The just acquisition of what is not yet possessed (yoga) and the full preservation of what has already been gained (kshema) were restored as the sovereign creed of the state.

Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath drew Kautilya’s triad of raksana (protection), palana (sustenance) and welfare assurance out of theoretical discourse and reinstated each as an operational principle of administration.

The Zero Tolerance policy against crime was the first and most visible expression of this recovery. For decades, the sociology of fear in UP had run in one direction. By 2026, it had been reversed. The farmer moving produce at night, the trader keeping his shop open after dark, the woman travelling through districts that once carried menacing reputations-their daily experience has changed in ways every resident of the state can describe and no single statistic fully captures.

Yet the statistics are available. A substantial decline in organised crime and the conviction of 1,25,985 criminals through Operation Conviction stand as the measurable record. Kautilya understood that when danda is just and inexorable, the accumulated energy of a society flows towards creation. That principle has been verified in practice.

The extraction economy of the earlier decades rested on one structural condition: that a rupee travelling from the treasury to its intended beneficiary would pass through enough hands to be substantially diminished en route. Direct Benefit Transfer, integrated e-governance platforms and the Darpan Portal collapsed that journey. Over Rs 7 lakh crore has since reached beneficiaries without leakage. An entire architecture of intermediary theft that had operated with impunity for a generation has been dismantled. The governance machinery that has replaced it is, in its essentials, a disciplined rendering of Kautilyan administrative principles in contemporary form.

At this point, the standard critique must be met directly. The charge runs that UP’s transformation is Hindu-majoritarian assertion dressed in the language of development. The invocation of Kautilya and the renewal of Ayodhya, the argument goes, constitute cultural politics repackaged as universal governance.

The response is equally direct. The secular-development consensus that governed Uttar Pradesh for the five decades preceding 2017 delivered, by its own measurable record, neither secularism nor development. Its administrative inheritance was a state from which the most marginalised Dalits, the rural poor and the unhoused woman-remained structurally excluded. A politics that secured its legitimacy through competitive minority appeasement while leaving the condition of the governed unchanged is not secularism. It is the most sophisticated form of social extraction a democratic system permits. NITI Aayog does not record the religion of those lifted from multidimensional poverty. It records their nutritional status, their access to water and their ability to educate their children. More than 6 crore citizens of Uttar Pradesh have crossed that threshold. That number is the only response the charge of optics deserves.

The philosophical depth of this model finds its closest modern analogue in Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya’s Antyodaya. The distance between the two frameworks is worth registering. For Kautilya, the welfare of the last subject is shaped by the logic of state capacity. A neglected people weaken the foundation of everything the king rules. Upadhyaya argues from a civilisational perspective. In Ekatma Manavdarshan, the condition of the antyaja is a moral indictment of the entire social order that produced it. It is not a management failure.

The Yogi government’s welfare architecture has operated in that moral register. Over 56 lakh houses under housing schemes such as PMAY and CMAY, tap water connections to more than 2.02 crore rural households under Har Ghar Jal, and a record budget of Rs 9.12 lakh crore for FY 2026-27 represent this commitment in concrete form. These are not protections in the Kautilyan sense. They are instruments of ascent.

Antyodaya does not ask whether the last person has been shielded from the worst. It asks whether they have been given the conditions to rise. The GSDP surging towards a Rs 40 lakh crore economy, more than 156 crore tourist visits recorded in 2025, including over 36 lakh foreign tourists, and the steady expansion of exports and investment tell one part of the story. More than 6 crore people lifted from poverty tell another. These are not two separate achievements reported side by side. They describe the same governing project, one read in aggregate wealth and the other in individual human condition. That both have moved together is the most honest account of what Uttar Pradesh has become.

The condition Kautilya named matsya nyaya, in which the large devour the small while the state looks away, had been the lived political reality of Uttar Pradesh for thirty years. That condition has been broken. Yogakshema has been returned to its proper place. And the last man, for whom neither dynasty nor commentariat had any practical use, has been raised. That is the record. That is the transformation.

The writer is a Research Scholar at the Department of Political Science, University of Delhi, and an Affiliate at the Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation (SPMRF), New Delhi; Views presented are personal.