From Ascetic Warrior to Sentinel of Bharat
Gorakhnath Math. A Flame. A Needle. A Vow.
The seniormost Mahant Avaidyanath holds a slender needle over the flame until it glows red. A boy of 22, Ajay Singh Bisht, sits cross-legged, eyes steady. The needle pierces his ear — an ancient rite of the Nath yogis — but he does not flinch. That moment, more than any later oath of office, marks his true entry into the highest stage of tapasya. Discipline over comfort, duty over self: a promise carried from the Himalayan foothills to Lucknow’s corridors of power.
Born in 1972 amid the Garhwal peaks, Bisht grew up with cold stone paths under his bare feet and Vedic mantras in his ears. His mornings belonged to school, his evenings to chants and chores. Though he earned a science degree in Mathematics, the gravitational pull of Gorakhnath Math proved irresistible. The piercing of his ears was not just ritual — it was a seal. Valour, spiritual depth and purity forged into a single identity he would later translate into governance.
Ajey: Cinema Meets Reality
Ravindra Gautam’s Ajey turns that story into a visual chronicle. Anant Joshi portrays the austere monk who rises before dawn; Paresh Rawal embodies the gravitas of Mahant Avaidyanath. But the film’s heartbeat is not hero worship. It doesn’t dramatise Deoband drills or anti-terror manoeuvres — those were captured in our own documentary Crimson Crescent — The Last Quarter. What Ajey conveys instead is the spiritual preparation and mental strength that underpins such action. By showing Yogi’s tapasya and discipline, it helps the viewer understand how a leader grounded in practice could achieve so much in so little time.
A Hunger Long Denied
Among the Hindutva-believing youth, there was a visceral, almost electric response to sacred invocation. The moment a “Jai Shri Ram” rang out or a Shiv Strotam played or Yogi Adityanath’s words echoed across a rally — the crowd would break into spiritual joy, not as performance but as release. Shankh-vadan, chants and invocations to deities stirred something deep in them: a hunger for sacred affirmation that had long been denied.
These young men and women — many first-generation temple-goers, many raised in the shadow of Nehruvian secularism — were not reacting to politics alone. They were reclaiming a cultural rhythm, a spiritual vocabulary, a sense of belonging that had been muted for decades. What looked like fervour was, in truth, relief. The relief of hearing their gods named without apology, their traditions honoured without footnotes.
Today’s Uttar Pradesh under CM Yogi
The security grid has expanded far beyond its old limits. Young women constables now patrol once-intimidating bazaars in crisp khaki uniforms — a quiet defiance of years of fear. They interact with shopkeepers, stop suspicious vehicles and feed intelligence back to control rooms. It’s a deliberate push to build counter-terror capacity where once there were only police outposts. Similar measures echo across other states. Assam under Himanta Biswa Sarma has deployed bulldozers against illegal encroachments and intensified action against extremist outfits. Madhya Pradesh and Haryana have hardened anti-riot and anti-terror protocols. Across the map, strict policing is no longer treated as a liability but as a legitimate instrument of public order — echoing the template visible in Uttar Pradesh.
Fortifying Bharat with Pre-emptive Resolve
When Yogi Adityanath took office in 2017, Uttar Pradesh was a state both feared and pitied — crime syndicates in the west, communal flare-ups in the east, porous borders in the north. Within months, he expanded the Anti-Terrorism Squad into one of India’s largest, planting hubs in Deoband, Meerut, Bahraich, Shravasti and Gautam Buddha Nagar — not randomly, but along corridors long exploited by infiltration and contraband.
Over eight years, the ATS and Special Task Force dismantled over 140 sleeper modules linked to ISIS, Al-Qaeda, JMB, PFI, and SIMI. More than 170 illegal entrants — traced to Rohingya and Bangladeshi pipelines — were detained for financing extremist activity. Because his character makes no separation between dharma and duty, the state’s security machinery mounted a quieter war — against the supply chains of terror. Since 2017, dozens of operations have seized RDX consignments, illegal firearms, and contraband smuggled through the Nepal and Bengal corridors. Cells were dismantled from Kanpur to Saharanpur. IEDs were defused before they reached crowded targets.
Some operations culminated in armed encounters — the most publicised involving gangsters and suspected militants who opened fire on police. By 2025, over 230 hardened criminals had been killed in such encounters and tens of thousands arrested under the Gangsters Act. From explosives in Gorakhpur to weapon hauls in Azamgarh, each episode signals a shift — from post-mortem policing to pre-emptive strategy. This is not just law and order. It is a civilisational assertion — that the republic will no longer be held hostage by fear nor its borders by silence.
Targeting Coercive Conversions and Street Harassment
Among the earliest flashpoints tackled was the phenomenon popularly dubbed “love jihad.” In 2020, the state enacted the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, later strengthened in 2024. It created stiff penalties for conversion by deception, coercion, or inducement — with enhanced punishment when the victim is a minor, woman or from a scheduled caste or tribe. Because of his ethic of protection, this law was not left as paper. It was enforced with an administrative and policing drive that embedded accountability from beat officers to senior ranks, creating a deterrent effect in districts previously prone to such cases.
Simultaneously, Mission Shakti and Anti-Romeo squads were expanded to crack down on street harassment. Police patrols intensified near marketplaces and educational institutions. In several high-profile cases, officers were filmed forcing eve-teasers to do public squats or taking strong action against repeat offenders. These episodes — controversial but widely reported — signalled a zero-tolerance policy on harassment that had long eroded women’s freedom of movement.
Bulldozer Action Against Parallel Power Structures
That same iron discipline drove a campaign of demolitions against mafia properties and illegal encroachments — Prayagraj, Azamgarh, and the notorious Sotiganj market in Meerut. Sotiganj had long been a car-breaking hub, a haven for dismantling stolen vehicles. In 2022–23, state police raided workshops, arrested scrap dealers, and sealed or demolished illegal structures that had operated as a parallel economy. The operation ended an era in which criminals treated parts of Meerut as “no-go” zones — reclaiming public space from entrenched networks.
Confronting the Mafia–Terror Nexus
Yogi’s sense of duty extends to dismantling the infrastructure of intimidation. Figures such as Mukhtar Ansari, the late Atiq Ahmed, and Azam Khan — long regarded as power brokers — faced coordinated prosecutions, property attachments, and transfers to high-security jails. Atiq Ahmed’s killing in police custody in April 2023 became one of the country’s most publicised incidents. Mukhtar Ansari has been repeatedly convicted under the Gangsters Act and shifted between prisons under tight security. Similar action has been pursued against other dons and financiers accused of sheltering radical elements. Together, these measures signal a deliberate attempt to dismantle entrenched criminal networks and end the climate of fear that had held entire districts hostage.
Compassionate Governance and Clean Administration
Asceticism without compassion curdles into austerity. Yogi’s other face is cow protection, mass vaccination of destitute bovines, and farmers’ schemes turning dung into fertiliser and urine into rural income. Over 7,700 gaushalas shelter more than 16 lakh animals, with 2.3 lakh fostered by farmers under the Sahyogita Yojana.
Meanwhile, corruption found no refuge. The ban on VIP hooters and private “agents” in government offices wasn’t symbolic — it disrupted bribe networks that had colonised police stations and revenue departments. Public hearings and digital dashboards began to replace back-door deals, giving ordinary citizens a procedural weapon against opacity.
Ideals and Archetypes
As depicted in Ajey: The Untold Story of a Yogi, Yogi Adityanath’s guiding figures are Shri Ram’s sense of justice and dharma, Parshuram’s uncompromising courage, and Chanakya’s strategic statecraft. The film frames him as an “intellectual warrior-kshatriya” — a phrase long used in Voice of India writings to describe leaders who fuse learning with decisive action. In this reading, governance itself becomes tapasya, not transaction.
The film closes with archetypal imagery: Shiva’s Tandava, Parshuram’s lone-warrior resolve, the trident’s purity and protection, the sustaining vibration of Om, and the Sun’s eternal rise over Bharat. These are not decorative. They are a grammar of civilisational leadership — suggesting that ascetic discipline and state power can coexist without corrosion.
Ajey presents a challenge to young Indians: embrace courage without cruelty, spirituality without escapism and power without corruption. It is a biography as provocation — showing how a monk’s austerity can animate a government’s machinery.
Behind the Screen
Directed by Ravindra Gautam, known for understated realism, the film draws its foundation from Shantanu’s original book on Yogi Adityanath. Building on that spine, Rajesh Chawla and Sneha Jha crafted a script that steers clear of melodrama, instead building a restrained narrative around discipline, duty and statecraft.Cinematography by Manoj Soni moves from Himalayan light to the sombre corridors of power without losing texture.
The score by Vishal Khanna underscores the spiritual intensity at the heart of the story — not as ornament, but as invocation. This blend of craft explains why the film feels more like a chronicle than a campaign — a deliberate choice that gives the viewer room to think, reflect and recalibrate their understanding of leadership.
