‘Bolo Jai Sri Ram and press the BJP button’?

While the PM and BJP make a grand show of the temple inauguration, citizens must ask: How is it going to help me?

That could well be Prime Minister Modi’s new slogan for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections to retain power for a third term. Voters in Karnataka will remember well Modi’s desperate call on the last day of his campaign for the Assembly elections here; he told Karnataka’s voters to “Bolo Jai Bajrang Bali aur BJP ka button dabao” (on the electronic voting machine). And how his campaign bombed, either because of that or despite that! It was no surprise that the Election Commission failed to take any notice/action of the most egregious way the Prime Minister campaigned then, shredding the Model Code of Conduct which stipulates that ‘asking for votes in the name of religion is not allowed’. Whether Lord Ram will help him retain his post for the third term or whether the rest of India’s voters choose to do as Karnataka’s voters did, remains to be seen.     

On January 22, the idol of Ram Lalla is to be consecrated, with the Prime Minister playing a prominent role in the ‘Pran Prathishta’ ritual. One can be sure that all the cameras will focus on him more than on the priests or even Ram Lalla himself. Hence, it’s necessary to understand what the ceremony is all about and why the four Jagatguru Shankaracharyas have decided to stay away from the event. 

‘Pran Prathishta’ refers to that ceremony in which a murti or idol of a deity is consecrated in a temple to the chanting of hymns and mantras, by which the diety is invited to come reside in that sanctum sanctorum  and the idol’s eyes are symbolically opened for the first time. This practice is considered to infuse life into the deity and the temple. No doubt there will be many priests chanting mantras to infuse energy into the idol, but what is unsettling is the presence of the PM, the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, and the high functionaries of the Union government and the BJP-ruled states. Most of these worthies are politicians descending on Ayodhya, with hardly any religious fervour or spirituality but solely to be present and visible to either Modi or Amit Shah.

That is the reason the four Shankaracharyas, the flag-bearers of Sanatana Dharma, have decided to stay away from it all. They have also listed important reasons, barely hiding their disapproval of the fact that  Modi’s involvement as the ‘chief host’ places him at the forefront of the event, undermining the traditional rituals dictated by the Shastras; secondly, that the temple construction is not yet complete and ‘Pran-Prathishta’ cannot be done in an incomplete home for the deity; thirdly, that this month is not auspicious for the Pran-Prathishta and that it should have been done on Ram Navami, the birthday of Lord Rama. While at least one seer has hinted at the underlying issue of caste, another has rightly stated that in India, the spiritual authority and the temporal authority have always been kept separate – the very definition of secularism – and that the Prime Minister consecrating the idol would violate that long-held principle. Besides, they have been far more acerbic in their comments about the event, with one Shankaracharya saying that “the government’s endeavour is not centred around constructing a “sacred temple” but, in his words, “a tomb,” and that Modi, “who was once seen at the feet of Shankaracharyas to get their blessings…is now playing an “adharmic” role and undermining Sanatana values and dignities”. That puts devout Brahmins in a quandary as to whether they should follow their religious Gurus or the political Vishwa Guru.  

With the complete abandonment of constitutional and electoral norms on keeping politics and religion separate, are we now witnessing the launch of a theocratic State? Is this the inauguration of the ‘Hindu Rashtra’? Or is that announcement to be kept in abeyance for the centenary celebrations of the RSS in 2025?

There is another worrying issue. Prime Minister Modi, in a post on X (formerly twitter), on January 11, wrote that “God has chosen me to represent the citizens of India during ‘Pran Pratishtan’”. This was not the first time he claimed himself to be the ‘Chosen Instrument of God’ to carry out divine designs on earth. In October 2018, he had said, “God chose me for this noble task,” while inaugurating a refurbished National Police Memorial and Museum; again, on September 19, 2023, that “I am God’s Chosen One” on the passage of the Women’s Reservation Bill. This repeated proclamation of being the ‘God’s Chosen One’ echoes a Nietzschean notion of an Ubermensch, or ‘The Superman’, a notion whose logical culmination was seen in Adolf Hitler in the 1930s in Germany. Just this week, even Donald Trump in the US has claimed to be ‘God’s Chosen One’!  

Modi may think he is the ‘God’s Chosen One’ but only Lord Ram knows where he will take the country. He often talks of ‘Vikas’ and ‘Vikisit Bharat’, though the unstated agenda comes out in unexpected quarters, such as in Manipur and Nuh, Haryana. The unstated agenda has a powerful appeal for the leaders of Hindutva, who must keep feeding the hungry wolves of Bajrang Dal and the religious mob of the self-appointed ‘Dharma Sansads’. Witness the drum-beating over Kashi and Mathura.   

Let us now confine ourselves to happy thoughts and consider Modi’s stated goal of making India the third largest economy, with a $5 trillion GDP sometime soon, and compare it with the average Indian’s per capita income of $2,300 per annum today. Our per capita income puts us at the 139th rank among the world’s economies.

There are a few questions that voters must therefore ask themselves and those in power: How is the building of a Ram Mandir going to change my life? Will it put bread on my plate? Will it give jobs to my children? As per the government’s own claim (or rather, admission), it is going to give free food grains to about 810 million people for the next five years – even as Modi makes India the world’s third-largest economy! And unemployment hit the highest levels since Independence in 2018-19, well before the Covid pandemic. Today, we don’t even know what it is as most of our data is suspect, including the number of deaths due to Covid, particularly in UP. We are not only poor and unemployed, we don’t even know how poor and unemployed we are! Maybe only Lord Ram can lead us from this darkness to light.   

(The writer is a former Cabinet Secretariat official)