‘Sitting on a volcano’: Two Indian temples clash as politics and faith mix

Digha, India – On a hot and sultry June afternoon, Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of India’s West Bengal state, swept a sun-scorched road to make way for a towering chariot in Digha, a tourist town on the country’s Bay of Bengal coast.

The moment, captured by dozens of cameras and broadcast widely on television, on June 27, marked the launch of the eastern state’s first-ever government-sponsored Rath Yatra (“chariot festival”) to celebrate the construction of a sprawling temple complex built to house the Hindu god, Lord Jagannath.

First announced in December 2018, and completed in May this year, the Digha temple has been pitched by Banerjee and her governing Trinamool Congress (TMC) party as West Bengal’s alternative to the more popular Jagannath Temple in neighbouring Odisha state’s Puri town, about 350km (217 miles) away.

Built in the 12th century, the temple in Puri is one of Hinduism’s four major pilgrimage sites, and home to an annual 800-year-old chariot festival, a weeklong event attended by tens of thousands of devotees. To kick-start the festival, descendants of the erstwhile Puri kingdom’s rulers symbolically sweep the chariot path, like their ancestors in power once did.

At Digha, that task was performed by Banerjee, neither the descendant of an emperor, nor a priest, raising questions about whether the construction of the temple was about faith or politics, a year before one of India’s most politically significant states votes for its next government.

West Bengal, home to more than 91 million people, is India’s fourth most-populous state. Nearly 30 percent of its population is Muslim.

For decades, the state was also home to the world’s longest-serving elected communist government, until a feisty Banerjee – leading the centrist TMC party she founded in 1998 – unseated the Left Front coalition in 2011.

Since then, it is the Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, that has emerged as the TMC’s main rival in West Bengal. From winning just two parliamentary seats in 2014, the year Modi stormed to power, the BJP last year won 12 of the state’s 42 seats. The TMC won 29.

In the 2021 state assembly election, Banerjee’s TMC and its allies won a landslide 216 of 292 seats, while the BJP-led coalition won 77. It was also the first election in which the Left or the Indian National Congress, the main opposition in parliament, could not win a single seat in a state both had previously governed.

As the political landscape changed in West Bengal, so did its players.

For almost a decade now, the BJP and its ideological parent, the far-right Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), have used Hindu festivals such as Ram Navami to expand their footprint in the state, often organising large processions that have on occasion passed, provocatively, through areas with large Muslim populations, with participants carried sticks, swords and tridents.

The BJP has also repeatedly accused the TMC of “minority appeasement”, in essence alleging that the party favours Muslim interests over the concerns of Hindu voters.

The TMC appears to be responding to that shift in politics in kind. In recent rallies, its leaders have been seen chanting “Jai Jagannath” (Hail Jagannath) to counter the BJP’s “Jai Shri Ram” (Hail Lord Ram), a slogan that, for millions of Hindus in India, is more a war-cry against Muslims and other minorities than a political chant.

“Now no one will say Jai Shri Ram. Everyone will say Jai Jagannath,” TMC leader Arup Biswas said in Digha in April.

To political scientist Ranabir Samaddar, the TMC’s temple politics is evidence of a brewing battle over the identity of Hinduism itself.

“If you agree Hindu society is not monolithic, then it’s natural that Hindus who reject the majoritarian version will assert a different understanding,” said Samaddar, who is a distinguished chair in migration and forced migration studies at the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group.

He argued that moves like Mamata’s represent a deeper social and cultural contest. “This is not a simple secularism-versus-communalism binary,” he said. “It is a protest against the idea that there is only one kind of Hinduism.”

For years, the BJP’s political opponents have struggled to craft a response to its vision of creating a Hindu-first state without being put on the defensive by Modi’s party, which portrays them as intrinsically anti-Hindu.

The Digha temple, Samaddar suggested, attempts to break that BJP stranglehold.

“As the dominant narrative becomes more rigid, insisting on a singular, state-aligned Hindu identity, the counter-response is also happening within the framework of Hindu identity,” he said. “It’s a dialogue, a form of social argument about plurality.

“This is also an assertion of rights. A claim to say, ‘We too are Hindus, but we won’t let you define what Hinduism is.’ These are attempts to break the monopoly of certain institutions and groups who have long claimed to speak for all Hindus. That’s what makes this moment significant.”

Originally introduced by the government as a “cultural centre”, the Digha shrine soon evolved into a 65-metre-tall (213 feet) temple, spread over 8 hectares (20 acres) and costing the state exchequer more than $30m.

“This temple will add a new feather to the state’s cap. Digha will grow into an international tourist attraction. This will serve as a place of harmony. The sea adds a special charm to Digha. If it becomes a place of pilgrimage, more tourists will come,” Trinamool chief Banerjee had said during the structure’s inauguration on April 30. She will seek a fourth straight term as chief minister next year.

But the project has faced pushback.

When the Digha temple opened earlier this year, the BJP’s parliamentarian from Puri, Sambit Patra, declared: “There is only one Jagannath Dham in the world, and it is in Puri.” A dham is a shrine in Sanskrit.

On June 27, the BJP’s most prominent Bengal leader, Suvendu Adhikari, called the temple a “tourist attraction, not a spiritual site”.

“Puri Dham will remain Puri Dham. Mamata Banerjee is a fake Hindu. Temples can’t be built using government funds. It is a cultural centre, not a temple. Don’t mislead the people of Bengal,” he said.

He argued that Hindu temples in independent India have been made using donations – including the Ram temple in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya, built on the ruins of the 16th-century Babri Mosque that Hindu zealots had torn down in 1992. “Hindus make temples on their own. No government fund was used to build the Ram temple. Hindus across the world funded it.”

Priests at the Puri temple were furious too. The temple’s chief servitor, Bhabani Das Mohapatra, called the Digha complex a “crime by Mamata Banerjee”, and accused the West Bengal state government of “arrogantly violating scriptural norms”. Ramakrishna Das Mahapatra, a senior servitor from Puri who attended the Digha consecration, was suspended by the Puri temple authority.

The criticism of the Digha temple is not limited to political opponents and representatives of the Digha temple.

As hundreds of people watched the June 27 consecration from behind security barricades, a 64-year-old local and retired government employee, Manik Sarkar, said he was frustrated.

“All the cost is coming from taxpayers like us,” he told Al Jazeera. “But nobody invited us. The government hospital nearby doesn’t even have proper equipment, and they’re spending millions lighting up the temple.”

Another resident, Ashima Devi, said she was anxious about the daily electricity bills. “Lakhs of rupees, every night,” she said. “Unemployment is already so high here. Thousands of government school teachers who lost their jobs because of corruption – they had cleared the exams fairly. Why isn’t this government fixing that? What will happen to them?”

She was referring to a $70m public school hiring scam recently unearthed by India’s top financial crimes office, the Enforcement Directorate, for which the TMC’s former education minister is now jailed.

One man in the crowd, who called himself a TMC supporter, interjected. “Tourism will grow,” he said.

But Sarkar pushed back: “All the hotels [in Digha] are owned by outsiders. What benefit are you talking about?”

Historian Tapati Guha Thakurta said that the state’s involvement in temple building ought to be seen as a part of a larger arc in India’s modern journey.

“There’s been a major slide – from the modern, secular model to a politics that centres temples,” she said.

After India’s independence, the state actively supported projects like the reconstruction of the Somnath temple in Gujarat, backed by leaders like Vallabhbhai Patel — the man credited with bringing together 500 princely states into the Indian union using a mix of allurement and coercion.

But independent India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, opposed state support for the Somnath rebuilding, she noted.

“He stayed away. That moment showed how contested religion was, even within the Nehruvian vision of the state,” Guha Thakurta said to Al Jazeera. “That moment was emblematic. It showed that even at the dawn of Indian secularism, religion was never fully out of the frame.”

Nawsad Siddique, the sole state legislator from the Indian Secular Front, a coalition of the opposition Left groups and Congress party, called the Digha temple a “blurring of governance and faith”. Speaking to reporters on July 10, in Kolkata, he said, “We don’t have jobs. Our youth are migrating. Our schools are crumbling. And we’re building mega temples?”

Guha Thakurta recalled the deliberate separation of state and religion under 34 years of Left government.

“Our generation grew up under a firewall between religion and the state,” said Guha Thakurta, whose research into Durga Puja – the celebration of Goddess Durga that is the pre-eminent annual festival for Bengalis – helped secure a UNESCO intangible cultural heritage tag for the festival.

At the time, Marxist cultural elites dismissed even Durga Puja as “opo-sanskriti” or a degenerate ritual, to be merely tolerated.

That changed post-2011, when Banerjee first came to power.

“From $100 in grants, it’s now $1,200,” she said, referring to state funds for Durga Puja committees. “Durga Puja is now a state event. And this model is spreading.”

“We’re sitting on a volcano about to erupt. That’s all I’ll say.”