The Administration of Certainty
Uttar Pradesh has never been short of rulers. It has simply outlived them. Ayodhya was already old when the Mughals arrived. Varanasi was conducting its rituals when empires were still learning to write their names. These cities did not acquire meaning because they were governed well. They acquired it because they refused to disappear.
The present administration governs with a particular confidence: the confidence that ambiguity is not merely inconvenient, but dangerous. Its moral universe arrives pre arranged. What results is not so much a political programme as a posture, one you are meant to recognize, not examine.
Consider what happened in Prayagraj in June 2022. Javed Mohammed's house was demolished within days of his alleged involvement in protests. The bulldozers came on a Sunday. There was no court order. There rarely is. His wife and children were given minutes to leave. Officials cited illegal construction. They always do. By evening, the house was rubble. By the next morning, it was a message.
This is governance as theatre. The bulldozer has become the administration's favourite punctuation mark, a period placed at the end of accusations before trials can clutter the sentence with questions.
A.V. Dicey once described the rule of law as "the absolute supremacy of regular law over arbitrary power." That was written in 1885, in a place that believed power should be embarrassed by its own nakedness. The contemporary state is not embarrassed. It arrives in daylight with cameras.
What distinguishes this style of authority is not cruelty but impatience. Courts are slow. They ask for evidence. They allow defense. Due process is an extended argument with power, designed to tire it into justification. And justification, for an administration fluent in certainty, is an insult to efficiency.
So encounters replace trials. In 2017, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath reportedly told police officers, "Thok do." Shoot them. Between 2017 and 2022, Uttar Pradesh recorded over 180 encounter killings. The police call them "gunfights." Families call them executions. The difference is a matter of who gets to write the report.
Vikas Dubey, a gangster with decades of political patronage, was killed in an encounter in July 2020. The police said he tried to escape after their vehicle overturned. He was handcuffed at the time. This did not make the news seem implausible. It made it routine.
Montesquieu warned that liberty disappears when the power to judge merges with the power to govern. In Uttar Pradesh, that merger is not a constitutional violation. It is a workflow.
B.R. Ambedkar described constitutional morality as a cultivated instinct, the discipline of stopping when you could go further. It is an ethic of refusal: the refusal to punish without proof, to treat accusation as conclusion, to convert authority into appetite.
It is, by design, unsatisfying. It denies the emotional reward of instant justice. And instant justice is what majoritarian morality offers. It replaces restraint with reassurance. It tells you that order can be seen, that safety can be performed, that fear, if directed correctly, is a form of governance.
When the Hathras rape case emerged in September 2020, the victim was a 19 year old Dalit woman, allegedly assaulted by four upper caste men. She died two weeks later. The police cremated her body at 2:30 a.m. without the family's consent. They locked the family inside their home. Officers stood guard outside. Later, officials suggested there had been no rape at all. The state's speed in denying the crime exceeded its speed in investigating it.
Justice Brandeis once said that the gravest threats to liberty come from those who act "with zeal and little understanding." Zeal has always been power's most reliable disguise. It recasts impatience as urgency, violence as necessity. It allows governments to call obedience "order."
Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. But in functioning democracies, injustice rarely arrives as rupture. It arrives as habit. It acquires language. It begins to sound administrative. It becomes what people mean when they say, vaguely, that things are "under control."
I grew up believing courts were where arguments ended. Now I watch them become places where conclusions wait to be formalized. When governments begin demanding results from judges, they misunderstand the institution entirely. Courts do not exist to deliver outcomes. They exist to examine claims. They do not manufacture order. They formalize doubt.
The moment that function is dismissed as inefficiency, governance changes its character. It stops administering law. It begins administering certainty.
Uttar Pradesh will endure this. It has endured worse. Cities that have absorbed centuries are not easily broken by decades. But what kind of memory will they keep? One in which power had to explain itself to law? Or one in which law learned to nod along?
History is unambiguous on one point: certainty is the most unstable policy a state can adopt. Because certainty does not tolerate questions. And questions, eventually, are all that remain when the bulldozers leave and the cameras turn off and someone still has to explain where the house went, and why no one was allowed to ask.
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