India’s Digha – On a hot and sultry June afternoon, Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of India’s West Bengal state, swept a sun-scorched road to make way for a towering chariot in Digha, a tourist town on the country’s Bay of Bengal coast.
The first-ever government-sponsored Rath Yatra (“chariot festival”) to celebrate the construction of a sprawling temple complex built for the Hindu god, Lord Jagannath, was broadcast live on television on June 27 at the same time that dozens of cameras captured the event.
The Digha temple was first proposed in December 2018 and completed in May of this year by Banerjee and her ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) party as a viable alternative to the more well-known Jagannath Temple in Puri, Odisha state, about 350 kilometers (217 miles away).
Built in the 12th century, the temple in Puri is one of Hinduism’s four major pilgrimage sites, and home to an annual 800-year-old chariot festival, a weeklong event attended by tens of thousands of devotees. Resurrected Puri kingdom rulers symbolically sweep the chariot path to kick-start the festival, as their ancestors once did.
A year before one of India’s most politically significant states votes for its next government, Banerjee, who was neither the descendant of an emperor nor a priest, was given the task of building the temple at Digha, which raises questions about whether the project was about religion or politics.
Move to oppose the BJP?
West Bengal, India’s fourth-largest state, has a population of over 91 million people. Nearly 30 percent of its population is Muslim.
The state served as the longest-serving elected communist government for decades until a feisty Banerjee, who was the leader of the centrist TMC party she founded in 1998, unseated the Left Front coalition in 2011.
Since then, West Bengal’s ruling Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has come out as the TMC’s main adversary. From winning just two parliamentary seats in 2014, the year Modi stormed to power, the BJP last year won 12 of the state’s 42 seats. 29 votes were the TMC.
Banerjee’s TMC and its allies won a resounding 216 of 292 seats in the state assembly election, while the BJP-led coalition won 77. It was also the first election in which the Left or the Indian National Congress, the main opposition in parliament, could not win a single seat in a state both had previously governed.
West Bengal’s players also changed as the political landscape changed.
The BJP and its ideological rival, the far-right Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), have been organizing large processions that have occasionally prodded provocatively through areas with large Muslim populations and saw participants carry sticks, swords, and tridents for almost a decade.
The BJP has also repeatedly accused the TMC of “minority appeasement”, in essence alleging that the party favours Muslim interests over the concerns of Hindu voters.
The TMC appears to be doing just that in response to the political shift. In recent rallies, its leaders have been spotted chanting the BJP’s “Jai Shri Ram” (Hail Lord Ram), a political chant directed at Muslims and other minorities.
“Now no one will say Jai Shri Ram. In April, TMC leader Arup Biswas said, “Everyone will say Jai Jagannath.”
The TMC’s temple politics are a brewing conflict over Hinduism itself, according to political scientist Ranabir Samaddar.
“If you agree Hindu society is not monolithic, then it’s natural that Hindus who reject the majoritarian version will assert a different understanding,” said Samaddar, who is a distinguished chair in migration and forced migration studies at the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group.
He argued that moves like those by Mamata are a deeper social and cultural conflict. He claimed, “This is not a straightforward secularism-versus-communalism binary.” “It is a protest against the idea that there is only one kind of Hinduism. ”
The BJP’s political rivals have struggled for years to come up with a plan to create a Hindu-first state without being attacked by Modi’s party, which views them as innately anti-Hindu.
The Digha temple, Samaddar suggested, attempts to break that BJP stranglehold.
The counter-response is occurring within the framework of Hindu identity as the dominant narrative becomes more rigid and insists on a singular, state-aligned Hindu identity, he said. It is a dialogue, a social debate about plurality, as it is.
“This is also an assertion of rights. a claim that makes the statement, “We too are Hindus, but we won’t let you define what Hinduism is. These are attempts to overthrow the authority of particular organizations and institutions that have long vowed to represent all Hindus. That’s what makes this moment significant. ”
Bengal’s shifting religious terrain
The Digha shrine, which spread over 8 hectares (20 acres) and was initially designated as a “cultural center” by the government, quickly developed into a 65-metre-tall (213 feet) temple. Its cost the state more than $30 million.
This temple will brighten the state’s already already impressive. Digha will grow into an international tourist attraction. This will create harmony there. Digha is enchanted by the sea in a unique way. If it becomes a place of pilgrimage, more tourists will come,” Trinamool chief Banerjee had said during the structure’s inauguration on April 30. Next year, she will run for chief minister for the fourth time in a row.
However, opposition has been turned down for the project.
When the Digha temple opened earlier this year, the BJP’s parliamentarian from Puri, Sambit Patra, declared: “There is only one Jagannath Dham in the world, and it is in Puri. In Sanskrit, a dham is a shrine.
Suvendu Adhikari, the BJP’s most renowned leader in Bengal, referred to the temple as a “tourist attraction, not a spiritual site.”
“Puri Dham will remain Puri Dham. A fake Hindu, Mata Banerjee is. Government funding is not used to build temples. It is a cultural centre, not a temple. Don’t deceive Bengalis, he warned.
He argued that donations have been used to build Hindu temples in independent India, including the Ram temple in Ayodhya, which was constructed on the site of the Babri Mosque, which Hindu zealots destroyed in 1992. “Hindus make temples on their own. The Ram temple was constructed without the aid of any government funds. It was supported by Hindus from all over the world. ”
The Puri temple’s priests were also furious. Bhabani Das Mohapatra, the temple’s chief servant, accused the West Bengal state government of “arrogantly violating scriptural norms” by calling the Digha complex a “crime by Mamata Banerjee”. Ramakrishna Das Mahapatra, a senior servitor from Puri who attended the Digha consecration, was suspended by the Puri temple authority.
‘Nobody invited us’
Political opponents and Digha temple aficionados are not the only ones who criticize the Digha temple.
A 64-year-old local and retired government employee, Manik Sarkar, expressed his frustration as hundreds of people watched the June 27 consecration from behind security barricades.
“All the cost is coming from taxpayers like us,” he told Al Jazeera. No one invited us, though. The nearby government hospital spends millions on temple lighting because it doesn’t even have the necessary equipment. ”
Ashima Devi, a different resident, expressed concern over the yearly electricity bills. Every night, she said, “Lakhs of rupees.” “Unemployment is already so high here. Thousands of government school teachers who were compensated for passing their exams fairly. Why isn’t that being fixed by this government? What will happen to them? ”
She made reference to a $70 million hiring scam at a public school that the Enforcement Directorate, India’s top financial crime agency, has recently discovered and where the former TMC minister has been imprisoned.
One man in the crowd, who called himself a TMC supporter, interjected. He predicted that “tourism will grow.”
However, Sarkar refrained, saying that no one owned any hotels in Digha. What benefit are you talking about? ”
‘A politics that centres temples’
According to historian Tapati Guha Thakurta, the state’s involvement in the construction of temples should be seen as a component of India’s ongoing development.
A major transition has occurred, she said, from the traditional, secular model to a political focus on temples.
After India’s independence, the state actively supported projects like the reconstruction of the Somnath temple in Gujarat, backed by leaders like Vallabhbhai Patel — the man credited with bringing together 500 princely states into the Indian union using a mix of allurement and coercion.
Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister, opposed state support for the Somnath rebuilding, she noted.
He avoided us. That moment showed how contested religion was, even within the Nehruvian vision of the state,” Guha Thakurta said to Al Jazeera. That was a moment of significance. It demonstrated that religion was never completely outside the scope of Indian secularism even at the start of the movement. ”
The Digha temple was described as a “blurring of governance and faith,” according to Nawsad Siddique, the only state legislator from the coalition of the opposition Left and the Congress party. He said, “We don’t have jobs, we don’t have jobs,” when he addressed reporters on July 10 in Kolkata. Our youth are migrating. Our schools are crumbling. And we’re building massive temples, right? ”
Under 34 years of the left-wing government, the state and religion were purposefully separated, according to Guha Thakurta.
According to Guha Thakurta, whose research into Durga Puja, the goddess’s celebration that is Bengalis’ preeminent annual festival, helped earn the festival an UNESCO intangible cultural heritage tag. “Our generation grew up under a firewall between religion and the state.
At the time, Marxist cultural elites dismissed even Durga Puja as “opo-sanskriti” or a degenerate ritual, to be merely tolerated.
That changed after Banerjee’s election as president in 2011.
According to her, the amount of state funding for Durga Puja committees has increased from $100 to $1,200. “Durga Puja is now a state event. And it’s getting bigger. ”
