Ram temple inauguration: A festival of 'Hindu unity' for Sangh Parivar

With the pran pratishtha ceremony, the RSS looks to overcome all socioeconomic barriers, whether urban-rural, regional and caste, and bring Hindus together, reports Archis Mohan from Ayodhya

The pran pratishtha ceremony of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya on Monday is more than just a religious event for the Sangh Parivar — it’s a call for Hindu unity across castes and regions. The months-long mobilisation of cadres to collect donations, the door-to-door distribution of akshat, and the request to people nationwide to visit the temple once open to the public, all serve this purpose.
 

The Sangh Parivar, currently at its mightiest, is still mindful of the defeat of its political arm, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in the December 1993 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections. This defeat, at the hands of an OBC-Dalit social combine of the Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), came a year after the razing of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya.
 

Weeks after the results, the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), which spearheaded the Ram Janmabhoomi Movement, learnt its lessons. Its leadership, Ashok Singhal and Acharya Giriraj Kishore, along with Hindu seers they coaxed to attend, partook in food at a community lunch hosted and served by the ‘Dom Raja’ of Varanasi, the untouchable mythological figurehead of the holy city’s cremation ghats. “What Singhal did was unthinkable at the time,” said a Sangh Parivar leader.
 

At Monday’s ceremony, the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra has invited the incumbent Dom Raja of Varanasi, Anil Chaudhary, and 14 other couples of different castes and communities from across the country to perform the duty of “yajaman (hosts)”. The couples will include Dalits, tribals, OBCs (including Yadav) and other castes. As yajaman, these couples will perform rituals during the Ram temple consecration ceremony in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, trust president Nritya Gopal Das, UP Governor Anandiben Patel and Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath.
 

The “entry” of Ram Lalla in his birth place in Ayodhya and the pran pratishtha ceremony will be the beginning of the campaign for “reconstruction of Bharatvarsh” which is for harmony, unity, progress, peace and well-being of everyone, said Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat on Sunday in an article posted on the RSS website. He referred to the “continuous struggle of the Hindu society” for the construction of the temple and said the “conflict and bitterness” over the dispute should now come to an end.
 

Speaking with Business Standard, RSS All India Prachar Pramukh Sunil Ambekar said: “The pran pratistha is a festival of Hindu unity. It is a national festival.” 
 

Leaders or intellectuals of all castes, communities and sects of Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism have been invited to the ceremony and will attend, said the VHP’s International Working President Alok Kumar.
 

Some of those invited are Ramchandra Kharadi, president of Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, an RSS affiliate, a tribal from Udaipur, Kailash Yadav and Kaveendra Pratap Singh from Varanasi, the Lok Sabha constituency of the PM, Ram Kui Jemi of Assam, Sardar Guru Charan Singh Gill (Jaipur), Krishna Mohan (Hardoi, from Ravidasi samaj), Ramesh Jain (Multani), Adalarasan (Tamil Nadu), Vitthalrao Kamble, Mahadev Rao Gaikwad (Latur, Ghumantu samaj trustee), Lingaraj Basavarajappa (Kalaburagi in Karnataka), Dilip Valmiki (Lucknow), and Arun Chaudhary (Palwal in Haryana).
 

In November 2019, after the Supreme Court verdict paved the way for constructing a grand Ram Temple, the RSS and its affiliates planned to galvanise cadres to collect donations for the temple as a symbol of participation of all castes and communities. The 40-day drive could take place only after the abating of the two coronavirus waves in 2020 and 2021, where cadres reached out to 12.9 crore households, which is half of the total households in the country, a Sangh Parivar leader said.

“We tried to overcome all socioeconomic barriers, whether urban-rural, regional, and caste,” the Sangh Parivar leader said.

According to him, against the claims of the Dravidian parties that Tamils do not subscribe to the RSS’ vision of Sanatan Dharma, as many as 75 per cent of the households in Tamil Nadu contributed to the nidhi, or donations for the Ram Temple construction. However, the Sangh Parivar’s leaders conceded that support for the temple in Tamil Nadu, where Hindus are profoundly religious, may not translate into any significant support for the BJP in the forthcoming Lok Sabha polls.
 

 In Ayodhya, near Hanumangarhi Temple, sanitation workers and those involved in construction work and similar jobs avoid getting drawn into overtly political discussions. “Modi has got us the temple,” said Anil Vishwakarma, a man in his mid-20s from Bahraich, engaged in loading work. He further acknowledged that BSP chief Mayawati fought to get lower castes respect. Lekhraj Saini , a middle-aged man, claimed he prostrated all the way from the Delhi-UP border to Ayodhya — nearly 700 km — to show his devotion at the construction of the new Ram Mandir.
 

 According to Shailendra Kumar, who teaches at Dr Ram Manohar Lohia Avadh University, most devotees that traditionally visit Ayodhya Dham belong to OBCs and Scheduled Castes. The city has a wide diversity of temples, from the one set up by Kabirpanthis in Ayodhya’s Jiyanpur to the Kale Ram Temple, even Hanumangarhi itself and others. 
 

Whether in Ayodhya, the rest of UP or even southern states, the BJP has struggled to forge Hindu unity across castes. However, it has attracted more of the OBCs and Dalits to its fold since 2014 on the back of the RSS work, as Badri Narayan, the author of Republic of Hindutva who teaches at Prayagraj’s GB Pant Social Science Institute, has documented. 
 

The Ram Janmabhoomi movement helped the BJP electorally since 1989, but Hindu unity across regions and castes continues to elude it. Will the Ram Temple construction achieve it for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls? Indications from the BJP were that it will focus on the labharthi varg, the beneficiary class, of its welfare schemes for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. From February 4 to 11, according to BJP chief J P Nadda, a party worker will visit each of the 700,000 villages in India as part of the party's Gaon Chalo Abhiyan to take the message of the government's schemes for the poor. The construction of the temple would be just one of the issues of the several that the party will put forth.

As for the VHP’s future, Surendra Kumar Jain, its international joint general secretary, is unambiguous that Monday's pran pratishtha is only one step in the Sangh Parivar's larger objective of making “Bharat a Vishwa Guru”. The issues of Mathura and Kashi Vishwanath will continue to be on the VHP’s agenda, as will its campaigns against religious conversions, especially of tribals and lower caste Hindus, and against cow slaughter. “As long as conversions continue, our resolve to ensure that people return to Hinduism will continue,” he said.


 

Ayodhya may clock Rs 55K crore a year in tourism revenue: UP

Against the backdrop of the January 22 consecration of the Lord Ram temple in Ayodhya, the Uttar Pradesh government estimates the temple town to generate Rs 55,000 crore annually in tourism revenue. In the near future, Ayodhya is expected to witness a tourist footfall of almost 30 million annually. “On an average, a tourist would spend anywhere between Rs 2,000 to Rs 2,500 during the Ayodhya sojourn, which would generate a revenue of at least Rs 55,000 crore,” UP tourism and culture minister Jaiveer Singh said.


Car rally, Tesla light show in California

Over 1,100 enthusiastic riders, carrying saffron banners with the image of the Ram temple, participated in a massive car rally in the Bay Area, California. The rally was taken from Sunnyvale to Warm Spring BART station, Golden Gate, followed by a spectacular Tesla car light show on Saturday evening. Led by a giant Ram Rath, the rally covered almost 100 miles and was escorted by two police cars for security reasons.