In the name of goddess: BJP pulls yet another Mandir card in Bihar

‘People don’t cast their votes, they vote castes’: this cliche mantra continues to excite politicians and voters alike in most parts of the country, particularly in Bihar. 

With election clouds gathering over the state, politicians of all shades are checking the permutations and combinations of caste formulas once again. The BJP, however, has upped the game, by casting a wider net of religion in this part of the cow-belt. And what is a better way than to invoke Goddess Sita, after reaping rich political dividends in the name of Lord Ram during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

From August 8 until the culmination of Assembly elections in late November, the saffron party will piggyback on religion and the emotive issue of yet another temple. This time it is a temple for Sita, who, as per mythology, was born at Punaura Dham in Sitamarhi.

The temple, planned on a scale and grandeur comparable to the Ram temple in Ayodhya, is coming up on a 50-acre land at Punaura Dham.

The foundation stone for the Rs 882-crore temple was laid by Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Friday,  a move widely seen as an attempt to expand the BJP’s base by bringing in voters from across caste lines.

In the outgoing Assembly, the BJP is the single largest party with 80 MLAs. Its alliance partner JD (U)
has 45 members. Along with four MLAs of the HAM (Jitan Ram Manjhi’s Hindustan Awam Morcha) and two Independents, the NDA tally is 131 in the 243-member House. In the 2020 Assembly elections, the BJP had bagged 19.8% votes while the JD (U) got 15.7%.

Compare it with the Opposition: the RJD had bagged 23.5% votes and 75 seats while its key allies Congress got 9.6% votes and 19 seats, and the CPI-ML 3.2% votes and 12 seats. Together, the RJD-led Mahagatbandhan, the earlier avatar of the INDIA bloc, got 111 seats. This included two seats each won by the CPI and the CPM.

In terms of percentage, both the NDA and the INDIA bloc got around 36% votes each in 2020.

It is against the backdrop of this close contest that Shah wants to leave nothing to chance in 2025. His focus seems to be on an extra mileage which could keep the saffron brigade ahead of its rivals, both within and outside the NDA.

The BJP is expecting this additional momentum from a host of Sita-centric initiatives, such as the new Sita temple, an exclusive Ram-Janki Path corridor (Sita, daughter of Lord Janak, is also known as Janki) from Ayodhya to Sitamarhi, extension of the Ramayana Circuit up to Janakpur (in Nepal where Lord Janak ruled).

The move may have its electoral impact in 60 Assembly seats in Mithilanchal (mostly in North Bihar districts including Madhubani, Darbhanga, Sitamarhi, Shoehar, Saharsa and other adjoining districts).

The BJP, which is primarily seen as a party of Brahmins, Kayasthas and Vaishyas, wants a rainbow coalition of numerically strong Extremely Backward Castes (EBCs), Other Backward Castes (OBCs) and Dalits. And for this to happen, the party believes that it needs to unify the Hindus and solidify the Hindutva card.

“The BJP was the first political party that felt the pulse of the people when it came to emotive issues like the Mandir. It all began with Advani’s Rath Yatra in 1990 thereby enabling the party to spread its tentacles,” said Giridhar Jha, a veteran political commentator and senior editor of a national magazine.

“The controversy over Babri Masjid and its demolition, and the construction of Ram temple, helped the BJP widen its vote base. However, if the construction of a Sita temple will help the BJP in Bihar is yet to be seen,” he said. Jha, however, hastened to add that chances are there that the “gullible” voters of Bihar could be carried away by the issue of a grand temple for Sita.

Political scientist Ajay Kumar, who has written on Bihar for over three decades, concurred. “It’s true that the first Assembly election after the Babri Masjid demolition was held here in 1995. The BJP’s performance in the undivided Bihar (Jharkhand was then its part) was a damp squib. But that was the Advani era. In Modi’s tenure, the BJP’s focus in Bihar is on 3 Ms: Mandir, Mahila and Modi. All three combined together may shore up the BJP’s numbers, something which everyone within the BJP too wants so that it could have its own chief minister in a state which, so far, has not seen any saffron CM,” he said.