Faith and State are a powerful mix for Modi

By Mihir Sharma

In India, the third week of January has always been a time for nationalist pageantry. It features two national holidays: the birthday of the Bengali revolutionary Subhash Chandra Bose, and the anniversary of the adoption of India’s liberal constitution in 1950. On the latter, Republic Day, parades across the country showcase not just tanks, missiles, bagpipes, and flags, but also folk dances and cultural achievements — all the things that contribute to this country’s famously lively public life.

This year, however, all this republican tradition will be overshadowed by a ceremony both older and newer: Monday’s inauguration, or perhaps re-consecration, of a temple to the Hindu god-king Ram in Ayodhya.

Ayodhya is the small town in the vast northern state of Uttar Pradesh where Hindus believe Ram lived and reigned, and which, more recently, has been the site of a land dispute between Hindu and Muslim litigants that has shaped India’s politics for decades. The temple is being constructed close to where tradition says Ram was born, and atop the site of a mosque named for India’s first Mughal emperor, which was shockingly destroyed by a Hindu mob in 1992.

In the more than three decades since, Indian politics has changed completely. The product of an act once disavowed by leaders across the political spectrum will this week be celebrated almost universally. Politicians, actors, and even billionaire industrialists will join the carefully choreographed spectacle: One tycoon declared in Davos that the temple’s consecration should be seen by the world as a “reflection of India’s goodness.”

At the center of this throng will be one man: Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This is not surprising in the least, but for most of India’s history it would have been. Modi’s centrality to this ritual goes a long way toward explaining why, as he prepares to launch his campaign for a third term, his position atop India’s rambunctious politics seems unassailable.

India’s prime minister is above and beyond mere politics now: For a solid plurality of the electorate, he has become a representation of the revival of both faith and state. No Indian leader since Mohandas K. “Mahatma” Gandhi has been so closely associated with its predominantly Hindu civilizational and religious heritage. And Modi is more explicit about his commitment to this project than the British-educated Gandhi ever was. The Mahatma was conscious, always, that India’s communal fabric is fragile and strove mostly to repair it; under Modi it is dangerously frayed and torn.

It would be too simplistic to view the symbolism of Modi at Ayodhya purely as archaism, a conscious attempt to return the country to some lost Hindu golden age. As with Gandhi, Modi’s revivalism is also radical and reformist — as underscored by the fact that he is neither a Brahmin, tasked with religious duties, nor a Kshatriya, supposed to hold temporal power, and yet will preside over a temple rite as, in his own words, a divine “instrument to represent all the people of India.”

Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party originally rose to power on the back of the movement to build the Ayodhya temple. The prime minister’s stature has since eclipsed the party’s. He has bloodlessly satisfied two of the three demands Hindu nationalism always made of the liberal Indian state: the temple, and a revocation of the special status granted to Muslim-majority Kashmir after independence. Achieving the third — an end to separate civil laws governing India’s religious minorities — seems well within reach if Modi wins a third term, as most observers expect.

Furthermore, Modi achieved all this, his followers will say, within the parameters of India’s constitution. It might be more accurate to say that, in both cases, overwhelming popular sentiment was legitimized by India’s Supreme Court. The judges that stood in the way of previous leaders — such as India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru — have not impeded Modi or the political project he has made his own.

A substantial proportion of those celebrating, therefore, will be rejoicing also that the long resistance of the secularized state that Nehru built after independence has finally been vanquished. Just a year after India became a republic, in 1950, its first president wanted to be present at the re-sanctification of another historic temple. Nehru told him sternly that if he went, he would go not as president but as a private citizen, and would receive neither the protection nor the protocol to which he was entitled. The contrast with Modi’s India, where the prime minister himself is central to this week’s religious ceremony, is telling.

Hinduism may not be India’s official religion — yet. But, today, it is normal for the faith to sanctify and support the state and its officials. For many Indians, Republic Day will now be an afterthought.