Bulldozer toys are selling briskly, like hot vadas, all over Uttar Pradesh. Parents are indulging children with toy replicas of bulldozers following BJP’s victory! This was one election when bulldozers and JCB machines could trump the Lotus symbol for their sheer public fancy. In fact, even as BJP workers celebrated the victory, the bulldozer turned into a mascot for the party. This was because Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had forewarned gangsters, henchmen and the remaining UP mafia bosses to expect steamrolling governance that would bulldoze them to the ground if he came back to power. The bulldozer was an almost constant in Yogi’s campaign speeches. He even famously said once, that while bulldozers were used to build expressways and highways, “At the same time, we are (also) using it to crush the mafia that exploited people to build their (illegal) properties.” It is pertinent to note that Yogi’s main political rival in UP, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav had pejoratively termed Yogi as ‘Baba Bulldozer’ while claiming the BJP CM would lose the elections. Interestingly, since BJP came to power in 2017, over 67,000 acres of government land was unshackled from the hands of goons and mafias in the state through the rampant use of bulldozers.