Ram won’t help but Nitish might

In the end, the bluster of Ram temple could not lift Narendra Modi’s spirits and he had to turn to Nitish Kumar for help. The chief minister of Bihar is a crucial former ally-turned-opposition satrap. He returned last week to the BJP’s corner hoping to stabilise Modi’s boat of unabated ambition. In the process, he ditched the opposition alliance.

Modi’s inability to pouch divine blessings for communal polarisation wasn’t unexpected. The dog whistle was still needed. Defiling churches and vandalising crosses sent out the signal. There was a need to ransack a Mughal-era mosque in Agra protectively, and to raise slogans targeting other relics of India’s Muslim past.

The communal powder needed to be kept dry. The peace call from the new temple’s pulpit seeking to usher the Hindu utopia of Ram Rajya had not enthused the opposition, comprising a bulk of 63 per cent voters who didn’t bat for the BJP in 2019. Even the grand Shankaracharyas failed to bless the event, with at least one of them calling it a political show.

The event did seem overplayed, and destined to be no more than media hamming. Reports abound of lucrative land deals ringing the city, which now has an airport of its own. Religious polarisation around Ayodhya, moreover, has been milked dry and might not be the potent brew again. Other avenues must be explored.

There’s an Indian saying that a closed fist is worth a hundred thousand gold mohurs or something as valuable. Opened, it loses the mystique, “it becomes worthless dirt”. It’s what may have happened at the temple to a revered pomp-shunning deity. Well-heeled men and women showed up in Ayodhya no doubt. But that by itself could hardly claim to define the electoral logic of a complex country in need of jobs, food security and, if possible, scientific education in backward states where the BJP is strongest.

Indians see Lord Ram as a shield against adversities, as a healer, not as a jewel-bedecked deity he was inaugurated as. After the mystery was buried in the rubble of the Babri Masjid, a mystery woven around falsified history, blind faith and misquoted judicial verdicts, there was at least the illusion of divinity working for the BJP. In the opulent temple built on the rubble, the illusion disappeared. Everyone saw the prime minister looking busy keeping the cameras studiously focused on himself.

Seen with more concern for facts, Mr Modi’s two previous triumphs, in 2014 and 2019, resulted from earthy elements far removed from the religious fervour he hoped to produce in Ayodhya last week. In pre-independence communalism, the two sides used slaughtered cow and pig heads to lure rival responses.

In post-independence mobilisations, the cost-effective and more high-yield method is rumour-mongering.

Rumours of Muslims attacking a train coach packed with Hindus was mined to catapult Mr Modi to the crucial local post in Gujarat, which became the launching pad for his higher orbit. Rumours of a Hindu girl’s molestation, though it proved to be a contrived falsehood, burnt down Muzaffarnagar to polarise Jat Hindus in 2014. The Jats have since rowed back.

In 2019, claims of an aerial sortie using ‘cloud cover’ to bomb an alleged cross-border terror hub to avenge the killing of 40 paramilitary men in Pulwama whipped up a nationalist froth to skim votes from. On all previous occasions, a divided opposition stood pulverised. That looks different for the 2024 contest. The INDIA allies are savvier in guarding their turf. It’s an asset but also a challenge.

It so happens that India’s political cookie is baked from caste and regional interests. Kumar’s departure could be a setback for the anti-Modi grouping, but it has its own contradictions.