From left: Mamata Banerjee, Suvendu Adhikari
Credit: PTI photo
Kolkata: In another move to blunt the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Hindutva ahead of the West Bengal assembly elections, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee will lay the foundation of a temple of Goddess Durga in Kolkata on Monday, even as the saffron party accused the Trinamool Congress supremo of succumbing to pressure from Muslims to change its venue.
Mamata will lay the foundation of the ‘Durga Angan’, a temple of Goddess Durga, in New Town in Kolkata, just eight months after she inaugurated a grandiose temple of Lord Jagannatha in Digha, a coastal town in the Purba Medinipur district of the state.
The state government will spend approximately Rs 262 crore to build the temple of Goddess Durga on a 17-acre plot. It had spent Rs 250 crore to build the temple of Lord Jagannatha on approximately 24 acres of land in Digha.
The Durga Puja held in Kolkata, as well as in the rest of West Bengal and elsewhere in the country and around the world every autumn, was inscribed on UNESCO’s list of “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity” in 2021. The ‘Durga Angan’ will, however, be built as a place of regular worship of Goddess Durga, according to the state government officials.
Not only the shrines of Lord Jagannatha and Goddess Durga in Digha and Kolkata, but Mamata recently also promised to build a temple of Mahakal (or Lord Shiva) in Siliguri – apparently to take the fizz out of the BJP’s Hindutva campaign and its allegation that the TMC government in West Bengal was pursuing a policy of appeasing the Muslims.
The assembly polls in West Bengal are expected to take place in April-May 2026.
The TMC supremo will lay the foundation of the Durga Angan in New Town at a time when the BJP accused her party of opposing the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in West Bengal to protect its vote bank of illegal Muslim migrants from neighbouring Bangladesh.
The BJP has been alleging that the TMC has been helping illegal Muslim migrants from Bangladesh settle down in West Bengal after crossing over to India, and thus changed the demographic profile of the border districts of the state, posing a threat to the Hindus.
The BJP also sought to lend credence to its allegation against the government led by Mamata by highlighting the TMC legislator Humayun Kabir’s bid to build a “Babri Mosque” in Murshidabad, although he was already suspended by the party.
The saffron party has been opposing Mamata’s bid to build ‘Durga Angan’ in Kolkata, just as it did when the TMC government constructed the temple of Lord Jagannatha in Digha.
Suvendu Adhikari, a state BJP heavyweight, said that the Constitution of India did not allow the construction of any place of worship, be it a temple, mosque, church or gurdwara, with the money the government received from the taxpayers. He said that no Hindu shrine should be built with government funds. He also said that when the Hindus would need a place of worship, they would build it by collecting donations from within the community, as had been done in the case of Ram Mandir in Ayodhya.
After the site for laying the foundation of the Durga Angan in New Town in Kolkata was made public, Adhikari alleged that the TMC government had shifted the venue under pressure from the Muslims.
He alleged that some Muslim owners of the plot originally selected for the project had declined to give their land for the construction of a temple of Goddess Durga, and the TMC government had succumbed to the pressure.
“To keep her vote-bank happy, she (chief minister) decided to shift the proposed Durga Angan to a new site,” alleged the Leader of the Opposition in the West Bengal assembly.
The TMC government, however, said that the proposed Durga Angan had been shifted to a new site, which had been found to be bigger and more suitable for the construction of the shrine than the previous one.
Adhikari and other BJP leaders had earlier this year criticised the TMC government for referring to the new shrine of Lord Jagannatha in Digha as a ‘dham’, pointing out that Hindu religious texts recognised only four ‘dhams’ – Dwarka, Badrinath, Puri and Rameshwaram – and no new temple could be called a ‘dham’.
The BJP had also alleged that he “unauthorised use of surplus sacred wood” from the 12th-century temple of Lord Jagannatha at Puri in Odisha to make the idols of the deities consecrated at the new shrine in Digha was a disgraceful conduct and an affront to ethics, morality and centuries-old culture and traditions. The TMC had dismissed the allegation.