Yogi Adityanath is the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh (UP), India's biggest state, with 240m people. He has held the post since 2017. A monk who renounced worldly possessions, he is the head priest of a temple in Gorakhpur. Some see him as a possible future prime minister; he represents a muscular Hindu nationalism that combines infrastructure-building with hostility towards Muslims.
UP's total output is around $300bn. Under Adityanath the state has grown at an annualised rate of 6.9% (excluding 2020-21); in the past three years it has grown faster than India as a whole. Income per head, at $1,300, is about half the Indian average.
The state has more than 12,000km of national highways, up from 8,500km in 2016, and 18 airports, up from six in 2017. State investment as a percentage of GDP was 6.6%, the highest in India last year. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, UP's business environment has improved faster than any other Indian state in the past five years, thanks to infrastructure as well as land and labour regulation reforms.
Tax revenues have more than doubled in real terms since 2017. UP runs a healthy budget surplus. Yet the state has failed to attract labour-intensive industries such as clothing. Its economy is powered by a small number of high-value jobs in the west; elsewhere there is a long tail of low-quality, informal work. Only 57% of adults work; female labour-force participation, at 35%, is among the lowest of any state, though rising—Adityanath credits a policy of reserving a fifth of government jobs for women.
Noida, an IT and manufacturing hub at UP's western edge near Delhi, is home to about 1% of UP's population but accounts for a tenth of its GDP. Samsung, Xiaomi and Google have moved in, lured in part by the incentives Noida offers as a special economic zone. Defence manufacturers have set up in a corridor stretching to Aligarh and Agra; IBM and Genpact have large offices in Lucknow.
Adityanath boasts of a "zero-tolerance approach towards criminals and corruption". Since he took over, more than 250 suspects have been killed and more than 10,000 wounded during "encounters"—the Indian term for when police shoot a suspect supposedly resisting arrest. Property of alleged criminals is routinely bulldozed, earning him the nickname "Bulldozer Baba". Between 2016 and 2023 the homicide rate per 100,000 fell from 2.2 to 1.4 in UP, compared with 2.4 to 2 in India as a whole. Many believe a lot of the encounters are staged.
Adityanath founded a youth movement many describe as a militia, disbanding it only five years after becoming chief minister. He has accused Muslims of waging a "love jihad"—seducing Hindu women to convert them to Islam. Muslim men who date Hindu women have sometimes been arrested or beaten up. Muslims complain that the bulldozers are especially active in their neighbourhoods. Adityanath told The Economist in November 2025 that "there is no Hindu-Muslim conflict in Uttar Pradesh" and that in his eight-and-a-half years "there have been zero instances of rioting and no curfews."
It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.