Beyond Binaries: Ram temple donation drive doubles up as a Hindutva mass outreach

Updated : January 18, 2021 01:41 PM IST

Overtly political statements have already started doing the rounds as soon as the campaign has picked up.

It will also offer a chance for a Hindutva outreach in regions where the BJP isn't powerful yet.

The political life of the Ram temple at Ayodhya as a mobilisational symbol hasn’t ended yet. The donation drive that has been launched by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Trust for the construction of the temple suggests that the campaign aims at using the upcoming temple yet again to reach out to the majority community.

The setting up of a Trust to build the temple after the Supreme Court cleared the way for it by a verdict that awarded the title suit to the pro-temple petitioners had suggested to many that the issue was finally over. However, even the construction of the temple has unequivocally been given the character of a public ritual where people in large numbers would be contacted and also offered a Hindutva ideological orientation.

The campaign

On Friday, the donation campaign, known as the Shree Ramjanmabhoomi Ram Mandir Nidhi Samarpan Abhiyan, started a 42-day donation drive that would culminate on February 27.

Nearly four-lakh volunteers are expected to contact 11-crore families, which means roughly 55-crore people, or close to half of India's population, in five-lakh villages across the country by the time the campaign closes on the first day of the holy bath in the Kumbh Mela.

A delegation of the VHP and members of the Shree Ramjanmabhuoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust met President Ramnath Kovind, who donated Rs. 5,00,100 for the construction of the temple. The donation from the President normalises public religiosity and underlines that the state need not function in ways that are distant from religion, particularly that of the majority community. The family of Vice-President M Venkaiah Naidu has also donated over Rs. 5-lakh for the temple.

It remains to be seen which opposition leaders would be contacted for donations. If they donate, the news will offer a bipartisan legitimacy to the drive and dilute any hard secular line against the Sangh Parivar. And if they don’t, the news will make sections of the population at a time when Hindutva is the hegemonic political force accuse them of being anti-Hindu, which can have electoral implications.

Politics

Overtly political statements have already started doing the rounds as soon as the campaign has picked up. As he asked Gujarat to top the country in terms of donations made for the temple, state deputy chief minister Nitin Patel said that while Sardar Patel would be remembered for the construction of the Somnath temple after independence, a “secular” Jawaharlal Nehru has begun to fade from public memory. In other words, being secular becomes Nehru’s undoing even if the constitution envisages India as a secular state.

He even waded into the “love jihad” controversy, wondering why people from "other religion" have an "evil eye" on "our girls", making it clear that a state functionary is essentially a member of a community and frames his sense of citizens in terms of "them" and "us".

Patel also made a remark that "some narrow-minded people" think that only their religion should survive, but added that till Mother India and the saffron flag exist, none can wipe out "Bharatiya Sanskriti" from the world.

The kickstarting of the campaign, thus, throws ample hints that it won't be simply a campaign to collect donations for the temple but will be replete with ideological themes and attacks on the Congress.

Outreach

This style of outreach around an emotive symbol has for some decades been a mobilisational strategy for the Sangh Parivar.

Gujarat Home Minister Pradeepsinh Jadeja said as much at a VHP fund-raising event at Vatva, underlining that the event reminded him of the 1989 Ram Shila Pujan that led to a mass awakening and became a public movement.

Indeed, the campaign has a precedent in similar campaigns that were launched in 1989, helping the BJP deepen its electoral reach in the days of the Ram temple campaign.

At that time, 1, 67, 063 Ram Shilas were collected from throughout the country and even abroad. Discussing the campaign at length, Christophe Jaffrelot says in his book Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics that "jars filled with water from all the country's sacred rivers were brought forward after the beginning of the Havan and before the ground had been broken; the first five bricks, as prescribed by the 'Hindu scriptures', were mixed with other materials, brought from the four corners of India; and finally the cement fixing the first stone was buried under earth brought from each of the (unidentified) sacred sites of India".

Mahayagyas were organised across India simultaneously in order to coincide with the Shilanyas, Jaffrelot adds.

These mass rituals aren't just about a Ram temple but become pan-Indian moments of mass outreach, using the symbol of the temple as a context to ideologically indoctrinate millions of people.

This strategy had worked at a time when the BJP was just rising and was no match for the pan-Indian presence of the Congress. It did take north and western India by storm, with very public campaigns centred around the symbol of Lord Ram, including the Rath Yatra of LK Advani. The flipside: these campaigns were accompanied by polarising rhetoric and even sparked riots in many parts of India.

This time around, however, the chances of further polarisation are lower, as the temple has already acquired judicial backing. Also, this campaign takes place in a context where India is different from what it was in 1989 in two significant ways: Hindutva has a much wider and deeper reach among Hindus now and Muslims are relatively much more powerless and sidelined a minority.

Indeed, the chances of violence are higher when the power structure in society is open for negotiation. When one community clearly becomes more central to a society than others, an uneasy, tense, peace is more likely to prevail.

Yet, the campaign is another opportunity for the VHP to reach out to people, particularly in the north, central and western India, where Ram is a prominent deity.

It will also offer a chance for a Hindutva outreach in regions where the BJP isn't powerful yet.

The potential of the Ram temple as a mobilisational symbol isn't over yet, even if it isn't an issue that can polarise society any longer.

For, many other issues bring about the sharpening of fault lines now.

—Vikas Pathak has been a political journalist for a decade-and-a-half and teaches at Asian College of Journalism, Chennai. The views expressed are personal

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