TEMPLE TAKEOVER
The BJP state government’s move to secure the management of Uttarakhand’s big temples faces a backlash from Sangh outfits and godmen
In 2005, then Uttarakhand chief minister Narayan Dutt Tiwari had to withdraw a bill to take over the management of prominent temples in the state after his fellow Congress MLAs revolted. Fourteen years later, on the last day of the winter session, current chief minister Trivendra Singh Rawat of the BJP successfully stewarded the Uttarakhand Devasthanam Management Bill through the state assembly. Once this becomes law, the new provisions will allow the state government to take over the management of 51 temples in Badrinath, Kedarnath, Gangotri and Yamunotri.
The Tiwari regime stopped at setting up the Badrinath Kedarnath Temple Committee (BKTC), which continues to manages these temples. The shrines, which are open only in the summer months, received over 3 million pilgrims and donations worth Rs 12 crore in 2018-19. The numbers had gone down after the 2013 flash floods, but bounced back after the temples reopened.
A senior Union cabinet minister in Delhi said the new law would help modernise facilities at the shrines. The BJP-led central government is linking four prominent Hindu pilgrimage sites—Badrinath, Dwarka, Jagannath Puri and Rameshwaram—along with 12 jyotirlingas, including Kedarnath, with highway nodes and railheads.
But a big challenge now for the Rawat regime is to douse the anger over the move, and not just of party MLAs and cabinet colleagues but also of various godmen. Along with them, the teerth purohit (pilgrim priests), local businessmen and traders are also up in arms. “These people are the traditional vote base of the BJP,” says a party MLA. The temple towns have seen heavy snowfall, which will slow down the pace of life in this area, and buy some time for the chief minister. The priests had held a mahapanchayat mid-November to mount pressure on the chief minister to make changes in the law.
The opposition Congress is in no mood to make life easy for Rawat. Party state unit chief Pritam Singh joined the protests and even committed that the law will be repealed if the party came to power after the 2022 assembly poll. Uttarakhand is not a state that favours incumbents, and that fact will worry Rawat too.
Rawat, who had won over some the state’s godmen with his announcement of a grand temple for Sita in Pauri district (in Phalswari village, the place where she is said to have taken samadhi) and another grand temple for Raghunath (Rama) in Devaprayag, is suddenly facing the wrath of various senior leaders in the RSS and the VHP. Alok Kumar, working president of the VHP, says “they (the protesters) will continue with the struggle but will maintain dialogue (with the establishment)”. Meanwhile, Baba Ramdev of Patanjali Yogapeeth met with agitating Akhil Bharatiya Akhara Parishad national president Mahant Narendra
Giri and extended his support. “If the government wants to take over the management of religious places, they must do so of all institutions across religions. They can’t choose only Hindu pilgrimage sites,” says Ramdev.
The RSS and VHP stand is that the government should have a very limited role in managing religious shrines. “The new law runs counter to this principle,” says a top RSS leader preferring anonymity. The chief minister, who skipped the assembly when the bill was tabled, says it was hard to get a consensus on the issue. State tourism minister Satpal Maharaj added: “We need this legislation to regularise and regulate things in a proper manner.”
These temples were traditionally managed by the BKTC, with the seniormost local MLA nominated as chairman, and members of local bodies and other prominent people from the region represented on the committee. The new bill will make the chief minister (if he is a Hindu) and the chief secretary members of the new board, with an IAS officer as CEO. “The board will work on the lines of the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine Board and the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam (TTD). They will use the funds to improve infrastructure, develop the temple towns, and provide better facilities to people coming for the yatra,” says a top state minister who, given the current controversy, also did not want to be named. ■
On December 12, as she addressed a rally of thousands of supporters in her hometown Beed in central Maharashtra, influential BJP leader Pankaja Munde’s words had a challenge wrapped in an exhortation. Addressing her constituency of OBC (Other Backward Class) voters, who have been BJP loyalists, she said: “The BJP has been a bahujan party. Don’t allow it to be controlled by a handful [of leaders].”
Munde, 40, did not name anyone, but to many, the apparent target was former chief minister Devendra Fadnavis, with whom she has had volatile ties. Like heavyweight OBC leader Eknath Khadse, Munde too feels that 49-year-old Fadnavis, a Brahmin, should take the blame for the BJP’s failure to secure a majority on its own in the October assembly election.
Munde lost the Parli assembly seat to cousin Dhananjay Munde of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), by 32,000 votes. The defeat was all the more humiliating as she was the only BJP candidate for whom both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah had campaigned. Khadse’s daughter Rohini, who replaced him in the Muktainagar seat, lost to independent candidate Chandrakant Patil by about 5,000 votes. “Someone at the top was responsible for the defeat,” says Khadse. “If seniors like me, Vinod Tawde and Prakash Mehta had been involved in the poll campaign, we would have won 25 more seats for the party.” With 105 seats, the BJP ended up 40 short of a simple majority in the state assembly.
Khadse and Munde are members of the BJP’s core committee, which takes policy decisions. They have announced a boycott of the committee’s meetings till the party fixes responsibility for their defeats. “Fadnavis was on Dhananjay’s side. He sanctioned all financial proposals of the NCP leader,” says a Munde supporter.
Munde has announced a statewide tour with other OBC leaders from January. “I will not quit. Let the party sack me,” she says. So far, Munde has the backing of two MLAs—Monika Rajale and Madhuri Misal—Khadse, Mehta and former BJP minister Babanrao Lonikar.
Maharashtra’s OBCs have been a BJP vote-bank, accounting for almost half its votes. In the 1980s, the BJP’s Vasantrao
Bhagwat played a key role in bringing three prominent OBC communities—Mali, Dhangar, Vanjari—into the party fold. This election, however, the party suffered the shock defeats of three key OBC leaders— Yogesh Tilekar, Ram Shinde and Munde.
The Fadnavis-Munde rivalry surfaced soon after the BJP came to power in Maharashtra in 2014. Munde made her chief ministerial aspirations known and claimed she was the only state BJP leader with a mass following. In 2015, Fadnavis relieved Munde of the water conservation portfolio even as she was attending a conference in Singapore. The same year, however, he backed Munde after she was accused of being involved in an alleged scam.
Two prominent OBC leaders, Girish Mahajan and Chandrashekhar Bawankule, have expressed solidarity with Fadnavis, calling him a visionary leader and an outstanding administrator. However, the BJP could have a messy rebellion in its ranks unless the differences between the former chief minister and Pankaja are sorted out. ■
Pankaja has announced a tour of Maharashtra from January and dared the BJP to sack her
Crisis is often an opportunity in disguise, and Rajesh Ranjan alias Pappu Yadav, Bihar’s don-turnedpolitician and five-term Lok Sabha MP, grabbed one this September when torrential rains lashed Patna.
Three days of blinding rains, beginning September 27, had left more than half the city under waist-deep water, displacing thousands of people. As boats criss-crossed streets and Patna resembled a marooned habitation, Yadav emerged on the scene as an unlikely hero. With a hundred-odd volunteers from his Jan Adhikar Party (JAP), he waded through the waterlogged areas for days, distributing food and medicines, and rescuing people.
When the flood waters receded, Yadav held a medical camp for the people. That he made these efforts in Patna, where he is thought to have no political base, was surprising. The 51-year-old leader, who served jail term in a murder case before being acquitted in 2013, has won all his Lok Sabha elections from the Kosi region, some 300 km from Patna.
Two months on, his hard work seems to be paying off. The JAP, which was launched in 2015, made a splash in the Patna University students’ union election, winning the president’s post. Manish, the victorious candidate, attributed his feat to Yadav’s flood relief.
Though the JAP’s success in the university may not be significant in the overall political scene in Bihar, observers feel it is a good start for the fledgling party. “Even Lalu Prasad shot into limelight after being elected Patna University students’ union president in 1973. Sushil Kumar Modi became general secretary,” says a JAP official.
JAP leaders say the victory could not have come at a better time for Yadav, who failed to retain the Madhepura seat in the 2019 Lok Sabha election. His wife Ranjeet Ranjan, the sitting MP from Supaul, too, lost her seat.
Patna has long been a BJP bastion. While the party lost the 2015 assembly election to the mahagathbandhan, it won all five assembly segments in Patna. It also controls the city’s municipal corporation. JAP insiders say the party is considering contesting all seats in Patna in the 2020 assembly poll, and Yadav could be in the fray from one of the seats.
Yadav sure knows how to keep the pot boiling till then. In October, he drove a garbage-laden tractor to a Bihar minister’s home in Patna and threatened to dump the trash there. More recently, during the onion crisis, he sold onions at concessional rates in front of the BJP office in the city. Observers see these as attempts to pitch himself as the only viable alternative to the BJP in Patna.
Yadav’s consuming political ambitions have done him no favours in the past. The RJD suspended him after the 2014 Lok Sabha election, when he was seen to be trying to usurp Lalu’s legacy. The Congress and the JD(U) have slammed the door on him. Even the BJP seems disinterested. All this has landed Yadav in a crisis—and maybe presented him an opportunity. ■
Pappu Yadav’s JAP may contest all seats in Patna in the 2020 assembly poll
Procurement of paddy in Chhattisgarh has become controversial as the Union government has refused to allow the state government to pay farmers a bonus over and above the minimum support price (MSP). With panchayat elections round the corner, political parties have hardened their stands. While Bhupesh Baghel, the state’s Congress chief minister, has dubbed the Centre’s stand anti-farmer, the local BJP unit, while unable to get the Centre to agree to the payment of bonus, is accusing Baghel of making an insincere promise. “CM Bhupesh Baghel, when he was in the opposition, had demanded that procurement begin from November 1, but has now extended the date to December 1,” said BJP Kisan Morcha’s Sandeep Sharma.
This year, the Union government announced an MSP of Rs 1,815 per quintal for the common variety of paddy and Rs 1,835 for the Grade A variety. The Baghel government had announced it would procure paddy at Rs 2,500 per quintal in 2019. This means it will have to pay bonuses at the rate of Rs 685 and Rs 665 per quintal respectively. The Centre has warned that if the state pays this bonus—something that distorts the market price of rice—it will not lift the nearly 3.2 million tonnes of rice the state provides to the central pool. Chhattisgarh will then have to bankroll the entire procurement, which it cannot do on its own.
Initially, Baghel announced an agitation in Delhi to compel the Centre to come around, but gave up the idea. Then, a vehicle rally to Delhi was planned, which was also cancelled. “The Union government had allowed the previous BJP government in the state to pay [an MSP+] bonus to farmers in 2018 and 2017 even though it stopped bonus payments from 2014 onwards. This was done to help the BJP win the assembly election. This smacks of double standards,” he said.
Invoking Chhattisgarhi asmita or pride, the CM says he has said his government will buy paddy at Rs 2,500 even if the Centre does not. He was hailed as a man with a ‘56-inch heart’ to PM Modi’s ‘56-inch chest’ at a farmers’ meet, of which there have been several across the state.
The Chhattisgarh government began paddy procurement from December 1, almost two weeks behind schedule, even though the Centre has not approved the procurement. The last date for procurement has been extended to mid-February. The state has targeted a procurement of 8.5 million tonnes of paddy this year. About 1.97 million farmers are registered with the state government for selling paddy. Sources in the state government privately say it does not want a full-blown confrontation with the Centre at this point. A five-member cabinet committee has been formed to work towards a resolution.
Aware of the burgeoning procurement bill, the state has limited the quantity of paddy a farmer can sell to the government to 15 quintals per acre, even though average production ranges from 20-25 quintals per acre. This means farmers will be unable to sell their entire produce to the government, which is offering the best rates.
An extended monsoon in October and November has given the state reason to believe total paddy production will touch 12.5 million tonnes, from 10.5 million tonnes in 2018. Chhattisgarh needs about 3 million tonnes of rice to meet its PDS requirement. It is expected that it will pick up the tab for the PDS rice even if the Centre does not agree to the bonus. ■