THE BJP’S TEMPLE RUN IN BENGAL
Temple- and ashram-hopping are, of course, de rigueur for BJP leaders anywhere, but the fervour and commitment are hitting new levels in the Bengal poll campaign. And it’s not just Ram and Hanuman (or Bajrangbali, the preferred appellation for the monkey god among the party’s more hawkish supporters), temples of Kali and Durga are also now must-stops on the itinerary, especially for visiting BJP and Sangh VVIPs.
This trend of propitiating the mother goddess caught on with BJP leaders after Trinamool Congress (TMC) chief Mamata Banerjee raised slogans of ‘Jai Maa Kali’ and ‘Jai Maa
Durga’ as a counter to the “north Indian” ‘Jai Shree Ram’. Durga and Kali are household deities in Bengal and far more a feature of the everyday worship and vocabulary of the devout Bengali Hindu. This was also Mamata’s strategy—to present the BJP as an aggressive outsider bent on redrawing the state’s cultural landscape.
The BJP soon cottoned on to Didi’s plan, and has since done a desperate assimilation jig by going all out to celebrate Durga puja. Kolkata had its first BJP-organised community Durga puja in October 2020 with Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself gracing the occasion (virtually). BJP lead
ers have left no temple to chance—Dakshineswar, Tarapeeth, Kankalitala—every major/ minor shrine has hosted BJP VIPs (this is not to forget the ashram trips, including Ramakrishna Mission, Bharat Sevashram Sangha, Kapil Muni’s ashram at Sagar island, the list goes on). Sources say it’s no coincidence that when Modi logged on for his virtual summit with Uzbek president Shavkat Mirziyoyev on December 10, a picture of the Dakshineswar Kali temple figured prominently in the background.
On February 22, railway minister Piyush Goyal dropped in at the Kalighat temple and offered puja before Prime Minister Modi flagged off the new metro route to Dakshineswar Kali temple with a Kalighat stop in between. The BJP is touting the 62-minute metro ride connecting the two important Kali temples as “PM Modi’s gift” to poll-bound Bengal.
The party has drawn up a list of more than 100 temples, mutts and ashrams, spread over 23 districts of Bengal, which will be in focus during the poll campaign. Union home minister Amit Shah and BJP president J.P. Nadda have already begun their temple runs, kick-starting their campaigns by visiting the Dakshineswar and Kalighat temples, respectively. In the past three months, they have criss-crossed Bengal close to a dozen times, and each tour was marked with temple visits. “They (BJP) seem to have done their homework on temples. In the districts, they have focused on temples that are of historical value but are largely unnoticed. The Mahamaya temple in West Midnapore is from the 17th century and Siddheswari temple dates back to the 9th century. I wonder how many people had heard of these temples before the home minister’s visit,” wonders East Midnapore resident Amit Barik Rana.
People like Rana, who worship the Mahamaya (Kali), are now equally at ease with ‘Jai Shree Ram’. “In fact, in East Midnapore, Jai Shree Ram has become a way of exchanging greetings. If Shah and Nadda can come to Bengal and say ‘Jai Maa Kali, Jai Maa Durga’, what’s the harm in chanting their slogans?” asks Rana. Even the top TMC leader in East Midnapore, Akhil Giri, is sponsoring/ attending ‘Hari Naam’ sankirtans (religious assemblies offering prayers to Lord Vishnu) today for fear of the BJP taking over the narrative.
“A TMC Rajya Sabha MP even donated Rs 6 lakh for a Maharshi Narendra Vidyamandir in East Midnapore. These schools have a strong network and support among the people,” says Amiya Jana, another resident of East Midnapore.
Echoes of similar assimilation can be heard in Bardhaman, Hooghly, Cooch Behar, Alipurduar and Jalpaiguri districts where people’s involvement in pujas and rituals has increased manifold. Though people can’t pin-point the actual reason behind this religious fervour, they do agree the two principal parties are trying to outdo each other to win the community vote. In the 2019 Lok Sabha election, the challenger BJP secured 57 per cent of the Hindu vote compared to 40 per cent for the TMC.
THE GENESIS
BJP sources say internal surveys have convinced the party that it is on the right track—there is discontent against the incumbent government and a feeling that it has a pro-Muslim bias. Shah keeps hammering at his rallies that “there are three sets of laws in the state—one for bhatija (Mamata’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee), one for the votebank (Muslims) and another set for the rest”. It has found some resonance among the people, who feel they are being shortchanged.
“No matter how much we claim to be secular, it doesn’t bode well to see the government pampering a particular community. The attack on junior doctors at NRS Medical College, Mamata’s outburst against the striking doctors and the delays in arresting the (allegedly Muslim) hoodlums… it’s just one of many cases where the government’s prejudices became clear,” says chartered accountant K.D. Mukherjee, a
First ask him (Amit Shah) to learn the Saraswati shlokas. They don’t even know who Maa Durga is and they are dreaming of playing politics in Bengal” MAMTA BANERJEE
Chief Minister, West Bengal
resident of Golpark in Kolkata. Prime Minister Modi in his speeches says the TMC’s appeasement politics is the biggest hurdle to the state’s “vikas”. He dug up a three-year-old incident to show how Bengali Hindus had to go to court to get permission for the Durga puja immersion in 2016-17 (fearing a communal flare-up, the TMC had withheld permission for the ritual immersions for a day to allow the Muharram taazia procession that year). “There’s huge politics involved in this, politics that focuses on votebank... appeasement, not sab ka saath, sab ka vikas,” the prime minister said. Prof. Sobhanlal Datta Gupta of Calcutta University says, “It’s not difficult to understand the future course of the campaign. It will be a highly polarised battle.”
THE GROUNDWORK
The RSS has had a big role in shaping how these grievances play out. For instance, in North Bengal, the BJP and Sangh Parivar organisations have been working closely since 1998 to build a strong network among the villagers through students of Sangh-run establishments such as the Ekal Vidyalayas, Vanvasi Kalyan Ashrams and Kreeda Bharatis. Rajen Adhikari, an activist in Cooch Behar who works closely with tea garden workers, says, “The Sangh has worked for decades among the Adivasis of Cooch Behar and Alipurduar. The Rava (adivasi community) villages in Alipurduar now celebrate Hindu festivals, the women wear vermillion and shakhas (conch shell bangles) as symbols of married Hindu women. Taking advantage of the severe poverty among the tea garden workers, the RSS, through their social activities, have managed to win the confidence of the indigenous tribes.”
One of the BJP’s new programmes is ‘Nishabde Jagao’, what Sangh leaders are calling a ‘silent revolution’. Says an RSS leader: “We will help the voters separate the wheat from the chaff. Electoral campaigns can be misleading, we will help people make the right call.”
Meanwhile, the BJP has also started collecting subscriptions in Bengal for the Ram temple in Ayodhya. Five million households have already been covered. “The amount is not big, but we are using the opportunity to educate people on why the mandir is a symbol of our commitment. We are also sending them PM Modi’s bhoomi pujan pictures and that of donations made by some of our leaders,” says the same RSS leader.
PEAK POLARISATION
The pitch is ready. The prime minister’s speech on February 22 and its references to appeasement politics has set the ball rolling. To give the polarisation discourse momentum, the BJP now plans to use a major temple, ashram or a religious place of significance in all their programmes. So be it a parivartan jatra or the aar noi anyay public outreach programmes, flagging them off from a religious ground or a temple is a must.
“We are trying to reach out to 200 religious and philanthropic organisations like the Ramakrishna Mission, Bharat Sevashram Sangha and Gaudiya Mutt to connect to their follower base of 17 million people. Combine it with their family members and you have a big number. The Ramakrishna Mission itself has a 4 million support base. Once the campaigns starts, we’ll have national leaders and ministers coming to Bengal and touring the temples and ashrams,” says BJP vice-president Jay Prakash Majumdar.
It’s a dangerous vortex, and even Mamata has now been pulled into it. She is taking part in puja rituals, chanting mantras at her rallies and even challenging the BJP leaders to shloka-chanting contests. At a rally in Pailan in Kolkata South, Mamata asked for a headcount of Hindus and asked them to put up their hands as she chanted shlokas, asking them to verify if she was getting it right. TMC Rajya Sabha MP Sukhendu Sekhar Ray says in Mamata’s defence that “her concept of religion is based on humanism and humanity. It’s all-inclusive, something the Hindu dharma of Sri Ramakrishna teaches us—joto mot, toto poth (as many views as there are ways)”.
Jadavpur University professor of international relations Iman Kalyan Lahiri says the current situation is a true reflection of how “politics is using religion to drug the people, their rationality and reasoning abilities. And the subalterns are the easiest prey in this polarisation narrative. In the villages and small towns, life is full of struggle and strife and they need an anchor, somethingto hold on to. The politicians who are landing there with their promises and bagfuls of goodies are human gods for them. And if it’s religion they are peddling, the people are willing to buy that too.”
The electoral battlefield is so polarised that the BJP is now focusing its booth-level effort on the 220-odd seats (total assembly seats: 294) where it reckons the religious binary will play out to its advantage. The 70-odd seats with a Muslim concentration of 25-60 per cent are not on the party’s radar any more. Nadda’s ‘Ek Mutthi Chawal’ and ‘Krishak Avijan’ programmes even skipped some 8,000 Muslim-dominated villages.
“Jai Shree Ram is the people’s outburst against the politics of appeasement. A teacher performing Saraswati puja is killed... what kind of Bengal has she turned the state into?” AMIT SHAH, Union home minister