God’s Politician

GURU GOBIND DOU KHADE, KAAKE LAAGON PAAY, bali­hari guru apne, Gobind diyo batay (Guru and God stand together/ whose feet should I pray at/ it is the good Guru at whose feet I will pray/ for it is he who leads you to God)”. This famous doha of 15th-century poet Kabir Das claims that the pathfinder is to be revered as much as God himself because s/he shows you the divine path. Widely respected as a guru whose teachings were beyond the constraints of caste, community, and religion, Kabir was illiterate and recited his poems to his devotees in a mishmash dialect of Sadhukkadi and Panchmel Khichdi, a mix of Rajasthani, Punjabi, Haryanvi, Khadi Boli, Brajbhasha, and Awadhi. His dohas resonated with ordinary people.

Several months before the consecration and unveiling of the bhavya Ram Mandir at Lord Ram’s birthplace of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh (UP), Narendra Modi’s critics had already begun their brickbats over a poster of the prime minister holding the hand of Ram Lalla and walking towards the temple under construction. They perceived it as a sign of Modi supporters’ arrogance, an attempt to make the Ram Mandir event more about Modi than about Lord Ram. Yet, quite contradictorily, lakhs across India perceived Modi as the man who led them to the bhavya Ram Mandir, five centuries after it was demolished by Babar’s commander Mir Baqi Tashqandi. Social media was already chock-a-block with memes that highlighted the Ram in Narendra Modi. The widespread acceptance of the visual repre­sentation is, therefore, rooted in centuries of patient waiting for a cultural resurgence. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata are epics replete with teachers, leaders, and the immensely pious who are revered as much as God himself. They include Hanuman or Bajrangbali, his most ardent devotee and the likes of Shabori, Rishi Valmiki, Ram’s own brothers Lakshman and Bharat, and a whole host of other characters, each revered for their stellar virtues and self-sacrifice, shining the path to God.

This is a temple of India’s vision, India’s philosophy, India’s direction. This is a temple of national consciousness. Ram is the faith of India; Ram is the foundation of India. Ram is the idea of India; Ram is the law of India – Narendra Modi, January 22, 2024

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Modi’s opponents went to the extent of saying that January 22 would be mostly about projecting a larger-than-life image of Modi himself. But January 22 was not only about re­ligion and religious fervour. Neither was it only politics. The Ram Mandir event has been an incredible instance of generational angst finding release in a perfect convergence of dharma, socio-cultural resurgence and confidence. It is a key cornerstone, the most power­ful, of an emerging, strong, self-asserting India of the 21st century even when reclaiming its centuries-old cultural heritage. By noon of January 23, over two lakh people had visited the temple and, on the eve of the prana parthishta, people across India had pitched in with at-home, neighbourhood and nukkad pujas to celebrate the be­ginning of a new era of civilisational spectacle.

Little wonder that veteran LK Advani, often considered the architect of the pan-India movement that galvanised thousands in the 1990s over the construction of the Ram Mandir in Ayo­dhya, asserted recently, “Prime Minister Modi is the chosen one.” And External Affairs S Jaishankar declared, “This enthusiasm is not political… it is a historic, momentous occasion when India is reclaiming its lost glory through the Ram Mandir.”

It was but natural that an ardent Hindu and committed Ram bhakt like Modi, official chief patron of the consecration ceremo­ny for the tallest in the Hindu pantheon of gods, would embark on a temple tour prior to the January 22 event in Ayodhya. This involved a stringent 11-day coconut-water diet and a pilgrim­age covering incidents in the Ramayana that extended from Panchavati (Kalaram temple, where Ram, Sita and Lakshman are believed to have stayed during their 14-year exile) in Maha­rashtra, to the Thriprayar Shree Ramaswami temple where he listened to the Malayala Ramayanam, to Dhanushkodi in Tamil Nadu. In Tamil Nadu, Modi listened to recitals of the Kamba Ra­mayan in Rameshwaram’s Sri Arulmigu Ramanathaswamy temple, where he also took a holy dip in the sea and bathed at all 22 wells. The prime minister, as part of the prescribed rituals, also counted rudraksha prayer beads and, in Lepakshi (where Ravan is believed to have abducted Sita on the pushpak viman and ferried her to Lanka), he listened to verses from the Ran­ganatha Ramayan. It is believed that after killing Ravan, Rama returned to Rameshwaram to do a Shiva pratishta ceremony before planning a return to Ayodhya. On January 21, having stayed overnight at Rameshwaram, Modi visited Arichalmunai, the southern tip of Tamil Nadu, as part of his Ramayana-connect tour in the state. The prime minister paid floral tributes at the seashore and engaged in pranayama (breathing exercise), also offering prayers using the seawater. Arichalmunai is where the Ram Sethu is believed to have been built. On January 17, ahead of the prana prathishta ceremony at the bhavya Ram Mandir, the chief priest for the ritual, Laxman Dixit, bestowed on the prime minister the supreme honour of the main yajman at the consecration event. The Dom Raja of Kashi, the head of the Hindu funeral ceremonies in the city believed to be a key place where the dead attain moksha or spiritual deliverance, was also made one of the 16 yajmans. Typ­ically, the yajman is the main host of a puja—the person on whose behalf the prayers are offered.

Even as leaders of the Indian National Developmental Inclu­sive Alliance (I.N.D.I.A.) castigated him along political lines for his activism on the Ram Mandir, they forecast that the south of India would remain unmoved by Modi’s ‘antics’. In reply, the prime minister himself posted a viral video that said: “When­ever I come to Tamil Nadu, the warmth and affection of the peo­ple leaves me spellbound. Here are some priceless moments from Srirangam…” Later, @santhi_ps posted on X (formerly Twitter): “a person from the crowd (later identified as Vaadhyaar Krishna Kumar, blessed Modiji with the same lines with which Kaushalya blessed Sri Rama!!! One of the best shlokas in the en­tire Ramayanam. yam palayasi dharmam tvam dhrithya cha niyamena cha/ Sa vai Raaghavasaardula dharmastvam abhi­rakshatu” This translates as: “Oh, tiger of the Raghu race! Let that righteousness, which you are fostering with courage and discipline, protect you.” These words of Kaushalya were instru­mental in Ram remaining steadfast in dharma. So much so that a rakshasa by name Maricha had warned Ravana, saying “Ramo vigrahavaan dharma (Rama is the personification of dharma).”

I feel that the cycle of time is changing. It is a happy coincidence that our generation has been chosen as the architect of this critical path. We have to lay the foundation of India for the next one thousand years now – Narendra Modi, January 22, 2024

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WHEN HE LANDED as chief patron of the pra­na pratistha ceremony at the Rama Mandir in Ayodhya on January 22, the temple town was decked with lights and diyas for the evening and crowded with flowers and traditional folk dancers of every part of UP, Ayodhya, Kashi, Mathura, Vrindavan, and so on. The entire ceremony, attended by the prime minister, UP Chief Min­ister Yogi Adityanath, and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat, lasted just over 80 minutes. As yajman, Modi unveiled the black stone murti of Ram Lalla bedecked with emeralds and gold jewellery (two of which would be mobile, taken out in the temple premises for devotees to take blessings from and one unmovable murti that would always remain in the garbhagriha (sanctum sanctorum) sporting his golden bow and arrow and a thenkalai namam (gold tilak). Modi offered a lotus at the feet of Lord Rama and offered aarti to the lord of lords, witnessed by ascetics and saints belonging to 150 different schools, from Kabir­panthi to Ramanandpanthi, from north to south to east and west all on one platform. The chief priest of the Mandir, hailing Modi, main­tained, “It is once in centuries that men come along who are ethically much taller, more courageous and righteous than all others, these are yug purush who transform an era through their prayers, discipline and piety. We are blessed that in our generation, we have witnessed one such who built a bhavya Mandir for Lord Ram through his determination. Prime Minister Modi has reclaimed our cultural heritage and rewritten history for the subcontinent and the world.”

Modi’s association with the Ayodhya Ram Janmabhoomi movement has been nothing less than a journey of complete piety and determination. His involvement spanned nearly six decades, dating back to the 1970s. As a swayamsevak in RSS, Modi had played a crucial role in the Ram Janmabhoomi struggle. Near­ly three decades after 1992, he returned as prime minister to lay the foundation stone for the Ram Janmabhoomi temple and then observed an 11-day fast for the consecration or prana prathista cer­emony on January 22. He was so single-minded, way back then, that it was apparent years before 2024 that the bhavya Ram Mandir would become a reality for millions of India’s Hindus. Just days before he hoisted the Tricolour at Lal Chowk in Srinagar, Modi declared on the Ekta Yatra, “I will come back only when the con­struction of the Ram temple begins!” It was January 14, 1992.

From being an organiser of LK Advani’s countrywide rath yatra in the 1990s to collecting bricks donated by people from thousands of villages in Gujarat for the proposed Ram temple, and being the catalyst for the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in his home state, Modi has played a pivotal role in a movement now culminating, almost by destiny, under his leadership. Un­der his baton, over 10 crore signatures were collected on behalf of the construction of the Ram Mandir between February and June 1993 alone. During the many campaigns for the temple, Modi delivered some powerful and thought-provoking speeches in Gujarat, including one that made a deep impact and was titled ‘Lok Adalat Ma Ayodhya’. Thousands of cassettes were sold to the public. In September 1990, when the Somnath-Ayodhya leg of the Ram Rath Yatra commenced, Modi, then the Bhara­tiya Janata Party’s (BJP) general secretary for Gujarat, was the charioteer for the yatra which passed through 600 villages. The Somnath-Ayodhya Yatra demanded a rigorous 18-hour workday, including public meetings that often continued into the early morning. Modi’s dedication to the cause moved Kamala Advani to tears but he reportedly told her, “This is my true calling. I am blessed to experience it.”

As chief minister of Gujarat, Modi asserted that the Ram Mandir would strengthen national unity. In the run-up to the 2014 General Election, the BJP election manifesto promised to build the Ram temple in Ayodhya, a longstanding demand of the party. Modi was determined that a court verdict on the site of the temple would be reached. He could have rammed through a decision outside the courts, given the massive public support the temple had among the majority community. But he chose to put his weight behind the Supreme Court and use lawful means for securing the bhavya Ram Mandir. In 2019, a Supreme Court Bench unanimously ruled that the disputed land be given to the Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas for the construction of a temple.

Modi’s opponents said January 22 would be about projecting a larger-than-life image of himself. But it was not only about religion or politics. It was generational angst finding release in a convergence of dharma, cultural resurgence, and confidence

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The November 9, 2019 ruling also directed that five acres of land be given to the Babri Masjid litigants in a “suitable” and “prominent” place in Ayodhya itself. The land allocated was just 20km away from the site of the Mandir. The verdict was accepted by all and it was the first step in the reclamation of the birthplace of Lord Ram. In February 2020, Modi announced in Lok Sabha that the government had given its approval to the proposal for the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra trust to take care of the construction of a grand Ram temple in Ay­odhya and other related issues. In August 2020, Modi laid the foundation stone for the Ram Mandir. Transformative projects worth over `11,100 crore, aimed at rejuvenating civic facilities and establishing world-class infrastructure in Ayodhya, were announced to include an Ayodhya airport Phase One with exclu­sive Ram Mandir-inspired artwork in the terminal; a revamped Ayodhya railway station; new Amrit Bharat trains and six new Vande Bharat trains; fortified rail connectivity from Ayodhya to many places in UP; four-lane, beautified roads to the Mandir; so­lar-powered boats on the Sarayu river; and several homesteads, hotels and dharamshalas with economical charges.

With the inauguration of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, a civilisational journey that began several centuries ago has reached its zenith.

A DAY AFTER DEEPAVALI 2017, Modi was at the Ke­darnath shrine to Lord Shiva in Uttarakhand, exhort­ing a gathering of devotees to chant “Jai Jai Kedar, Jai Jai Baba Bhole” with him. Without any qualms, he wore a light floral shawl, forehead smeared with sandalwood paste and turmeric, with a bright red tika placed in the middle by the shrine’s purohits. It was Modi’s first visit to this high-altitude shrine, among the holiest for Hindus, after a flash flood in 2013 damaged a part of the temple structure. He was there to lay the foundation stone for an ambitious temple development plan.

What stood out for its rarity, however, was the sight of an Indian prime minister proudly addressing an audience in the name of a Hindu deity, even asking for his blessings for the health and prosperity of country’s “sava sau crore janata (1.25 billion people)”. In doing so, he broke the mould and cast away the decades-long legacy hounding the country’s chief political officer since Independence—that of adopting a certain hypoc­risy in the name of secularism and refraining, even repelling, public celebrations of India’s predominantly Hindu culture and religion. Modi’s was at once a clear political statement and a cultural and civilisational manifesto—an outright rejection of the legacy of his predecessors whose interpretation of India’s secular polity involved officially marginalising, undermining, or distancing themselves from all that was remotely associated with Hinduism. Kedarnath was not the first occasion on which Modi as prime minister spoke of his Hindu heritage. Months earlier, he had flown down to the Isha Yoga Centre at Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, the campus of spiritual guru Jaggi Vasudev, for the consecration of a 116-foot statue of Adi Yogi on Maha Shiv­aratri, among the most auspicious days for practising Hindus.

By January 23, over two lakh people had visited the temple. On the eve of the consecration, people across India had pitched in with at-home, neighbourhood and nukkad pujas to celebrate the beginning of a new era of civilisational spectacle

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The widespread prevailing religious and socio-cultural sen­timent that was suppressed in the subcontinent for decades af­ter Independence peaked with the arrival of Narendra Modi on the scene in 2014. Modi was the lightning rod, the catalyst that boosted the self-confidence of the people and taught them to believe in themselves and take pride in their heritage. It began on a wintry afternoon in January 2014 at New Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan, months after he was declared BJP’s prime ministerial candidate in September 2013. Modi openly unfurled his banner of revolt against the prevailing socio-cultural and political agen­da for the citizens of the nation. He challenged the ‘Idea of India’, used as shorthand to refer to the allegedly liberal social order espoused by Jawaharlal Nehru, an order that was considered immutable and sacrosanct, one that marginalised the vitality of Hinduism and Hindu practices and, instead, celebrated a West­ern and sterile worldview.

These events were not merely a politico-religious display ca­tering to a specific constituency. They go very deep into India’s history and rich, vibrant past. Modi’s success, both politically and in reawakening the cultural and civilisational consciousness as well as the religious heritage of the subcontinent, was the result of complex events over decades and centuries; it was not an over­night phenomenon. It was an irrepressible yearning in society at large to be liberated mentally and spiritually from the thrall of the English-speaking elite of Lutyens’ Delhi, to loosen the vice grip that the self-anointed cosmopolitan aristocracy and pseudo-sec­ular haut monde had so far had on the country. It was an urge to reclaim India’s distinct identity and showcase it on the national and world stages without shame—sentiments simmering for centuries and finally ready to boil over. With this, the dominant semantics of culture, society, and politics began to be transformed, reflecting the voices, mood and sentiment of the vast hinterlands that had been forced into suppression and to the margins.

Modi’s association with the Ayodhya movement has been nothing less than a journey of piety and determination. His involvement spanned nearly six decades. As a swayamsevak, Modi had played a crucial role in the struggle

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Modi’s assertive and proud recla­mation of all things Hindu was part of a larger project of deconditioning and decolonisation that envisioned Indians owning the entirety of their past even when charting a progres­sive, modern course for the future. It instilled confidence in a society con­ditioned to view its history and civ­ilisational foundation as regressive and inferior from a Western perspec­tive; it engendered the resurgence of a Hindu vision of the world. At the level of the citizenry, it gave confi­dence to those otherwise relegated to the status of the inferior in a nation where an entrenched ecosystem had stigmatised the masses of vast tracts of rural and semi-urban India who had skills, talents, and innate abilities, but were lacking in familiarity with occidental culture, language, etiquette, and social skills. These were people who would greet each other with a ‘Ram, Ram’ or a ‘Jai Ramji ki’ and begin and end their day with invocations of Lord Ram but were forced to conceal their faith and religious affiliation in order to conform to a worldview promoted by the haut monde. In the face of pressure to either fall in line or metamorphose into something they essen­tially were not, they often ended up being left behind in the race to get ahead, both in terms of dignity and self-respect and material progress. Most of all, they were forced into immense shame about their traditions, language, culture, religion, and everything pertain­ing to their hard civilisational struggles and experiences.

RESISTANCE TO HINDUTVA has been instinc­tive to many and it is telling that new interpreta­tions of the interplay between religion and politics in India are not being penned in this country but afar. The best example of this new understanding is the thesis of Michael Walzer, an emeritus professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. In The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions (2015), he compares India, Israel, and Algeria as examples of “what went wrong” with projects of secularising these countries after they gained independence. Walzer’s answer is simple: all three were traditional societies in­fused with religion, a basic fact of life that their modernising elite chose not only to ignore but actively oppose.

In India, Walzer notes that Nehru, the first prime minister, spoke an alien language that was dismissive of the majority religion, Hin­duism. “But with regard to the religious traditions that played such a large part in shaping Indian civilization, Nehru was mostly tone deaf. Nor did he have much feeling for the emotional life of his own people, in which religion had a significant role…,” writes Walzer. In contrast, Nehru’s mentor, Mahatma Gandhi, spoke to the people in a religious language that was largely foreign to the other leaders of the na­tional liberation movement. Walzer maintains that, over time, this had a profound effect on Indian politics in terms of what could be said, done or expected in the interplay between re­ligion and politics. Nehru’s approach to the majority religion, one seen as ranging from apathy to hostility, soon turned into tools of vote-bank politics that pandered to regressive tendencies among minorities. The rest is history: in a slow turn from the 1980s, this led to what Walzer calls a “religious counter-revolution” that turned the tables on accepted notions of secularism and political “good be­haviour”. What was seen on the banks of the Sarayu on Deepavali under Adityanath and what Modi himself did in Kedarnath were the notations of an Indian counter-revolution.

A recent Pew survey found that Hindus tend to see their reli­gious identity and Indian national identity as closely intertwined. Nearly two-thirds of Hindus (64 per cent) said it was very impor­tant to be Hindu to be ‘truly’ Indian. That is the extent and shape of the fundamental changes Modi has brought to the collective psyche of the once-defeated and disenfranchised Hindu India by realising the Ram Mandir.

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PR Ramesh