India will don Bharat makeup for the next few months, its usual woes discarded and a single point converging or diverging the nation. Yes, you guess it right! It will be the Ram Mandir, which will be consecrated on January 22, 2024, between 12:29:08 and 12:30:32, precisely in 84 seconds, considered an auspicious time as per the Hindu calendar.
The temple is hurriedly being completed, while the refurbished, swanky Ayodhya railway station has been renamed Ayodhya Dham. Soon, the ‘Char Dham’ yatra might change over to ‘Paanch Dham’, as religious diktats will be rewritten. The new Ayodhya airport, with a rather long name, Maryada Purushottam Shri Ram International Airport, connecting the cities of Ayodhya and Faizabad, will be inaugurated on December 30.
The Ram Mandir is not another ordinary temple. There are greater and larger temples, like the Swaminarayan sect’s new ones in the U.S., but no Hindu religious place can match Ayodhya Ram Mandir for the interest it has evoked in the past, present, and certainly in the future. The temple, dedicated to Ram Lalla, was the birthplace of Ram, situated in a sleepy village that got buried under blankets of dust during the nearly thousand years of Moghul and British rule. The adjacent Sarayu River was a large canal, with water flowing only during the monsoon. The region was poverty-stricken, as were most places in the U.P.
The temple, which was turned into a mosque, was reclaimed after bitter court battles lasting decades. The forced demolition of the mosque by a few changed the political scenario in India, providing an Hindutva party, the BJP, to gain power.
The political opposition is deeply divided over their participation during the consecration, which a few feel is a BJP party affair. Leaders from the Congress party, Sonia and Kharge, have announced their boycott, as have Mamata Banerjee, the DMK party, and the leftists. With the next Lok Sabha elections soon to follow, parties and leaders could be labelled as those who participated in the temple rituals and those who boycotted, and their political fortunes thus decided, depending on their places of contest, whether in a minority-dominated area or Hindu-dominated regions.
If the BJP is blunt about their Hindutva ideologies, many opposition parties suffer from their lopsided ‘secular’ credentials, some overtly leaning towards Muslim minorities, which is their primary vote bank. The BJP party has successfully infused the Ram Mandir issue into a kind of Hindu nationalist pride in their political ideology, thus branding anyone opposed to a religious wrap of politics as traitors.
Besides politics, the temple will change the economy of the region, much like Tirupati Balaji temple is doing to Andhra Pradesh. Such success will steer the BJP party to a likely poll victory in 2024 and there are a few more temples, like Mathura, the Krishna Janma Bhoomi and Gyan Vapi in Varanasi, for future battles. As long as such reclaims of temples do not hinder the economic growth of the nation, hinder the employment of our youth, or sow discord between communities, only a few opposition parties will object, out of fear of their political survival.
I would end with a prayer: not to convert ‘Jai Shri Ram,’ into a war cry!
Sampath Kumar
Intrépide Voix
