The appointment of Yogi Adityanath as the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh has been met with much rejoicing or hand wringing depending on if you’re a glass of gau mutra half-full or empty kind of person. To the ‘liberal’ media, he is evil incarnate.

To others he is a saffron clad saviour of a marginalised majority.

Following the announcement, several media organisations presented a few of the new CM’s more problematic statements — from his fear of ‘Love jihad’ to distaste for Shah Rukh Khan. Also, his solution for the law and order breakdown in the state seems…extreme. For instance:

“If one Hindu is killed, we won’t go to the police, we’ll kill 10 Muslims.”

“If they take one Hindu girl, we’ll take 100 Muslim girls.”

But it isn’t all gloom and doom. Mainstream legacy media has been working hard to placate the fears of the left.

As the Financial Express assured in a story about his “true face”, Gorakhpur mathh of which Adityanath has been the head since 1998, is a “kind of social laboratory which employs people from all castes and community, including Muslims without bias.”

Setting the record straight, the FE story goes to great lengths to show that the yogi has been incorrectly painted as ‘anti-muslim’ by the mainstream media and that “[Adityanath] even runs a Janata Durbar in the Math [sic] for two hours daily to solve the problems of visitors, including Muslims.”

The Hindustan Times also pointed out overlooked aspect of Adityanath’s personality. In a series of stories, HT showed that the much derided CM loved animals, papaya and shared a “special bond” with the sole muslim gaushala volunteer on his temple, Man Mohammad (or Maan Mohammad or Mohammad Moan depending on which paper you read).

One of today’s stories reminds us that “while Aditya Nath’s [sic] love for cows is well known, he is also a pet lover and has a number of animals on the Gorakhnath temple premises, including a dog, a cat, a deer and some monkeys.”

The Times of India pointed out that the yogi is also an avid reader, with almirahs filled with “religious scriptures and biographies of great men — from Nehru and Gandhi, to Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King.”

But perhaps the greatest attempt to calm our beating hearts has been the internet: