The significance of Modi's Ram Temple ceremony + podcast announcement

Check out 'the Election Tricycle'.

If the immense socio-political significance of last week’s consecration of the idol at the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, presided over by the Indian prime minister and attended by major figures from practically every walk of Indian life – the corporate world, the film industry, sportspersons, former Supreme Court judges, retired military generals, and of course politicians (not counting the Opposition) and religious leaders – was not evident to you, a short excerpt from Narendra Modi’s speech to the nation afterwards should give you a hint:

“After centuries of unprecedented patience, countless sacrifices and penance, our Lord Ram has arrived… January 22, 2024, is not a date on a calendar. This is the origin of a new time cycle. A nation rising up after breaking the mentality of slavery, a nation taking courage from every bit of the past, creates history in this way. A thousand years from now, people will talk about this date, this moment. These are indelible memory lines being inscribed on the wheel of time.

…

This temple is not just a temple to a god. This is a temple of India’s vision, India’s philosophy, India’s direction. This is a temple of national consciousness. Ram is the faith of India, Ram is the foundation of India. Ram is the idea of India, Ram is the law of India. Ram is the consciousness of India, Ram is the thinking of India. Ram is the prestige of India, Ram is the glory of India.”

It may be hard to untangle all of the threads that have led to this moment and to break down just what it means, for Indian politics, society and, for that matter, Hinduism. But we can try to tackle at least a couple of those elements.

However, before I get to this breakdown, an announcement:

The Election Tricycle

You’ve read the headlines about 2024 being a massive year for elections around the world, with nearly half of humanity going to the polls. We decided to dig into three of the biggest of those elections.

Presenting The Election Tricycle, a weekly podcast that will track developments and characters from upcoming elections in the US, the UK and India, and hopefully engage with what it means to be watching these three democracies at work.

The show is hosted by Emily Tamkin, who writes the excellent ET Write Home, Tom Hamilton, author of the UK politics-focused Dividing Lines, and me. It’s produced by Podot’s Nick Hilton, who writes Future Proof.

You can subscribe to it on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Ram Temple

Many have identified the massive Ram Temple ceremony on January 22 as a vital turning point in the history of Independent India, not just because of the immediate impact it will have on the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s electoral fortunes this year, but also because of what it says about India’s transformation under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

For those unfamiliar, the temple is built on the site of a medieval mosque that was violently demolished in 1992 by tens of thousands of vandals instigated by the BJP and the broader Hindutva ecosystem. Many believe the site was the birthplace of Ram, the Hindu God whose story is recounted in the epic Ramayana, and that the mosque was constructed over the ruins of a grand temple that was - according to this belief - destroyed by the Central Asian Muslim emperor Babur. In the 1980s, the BJP built a massive social and political movement around the demand for a Ram Temple, giving the party an issue that propelled it into power or electoral significance in a number of states and at the national level. The Hindutva ecosystem’s Ram Temple campaign relied on the demonising of Muslims in order to build a broad-based Hindu constituency, a strategy that has been perfected over the last decade by Modi and the current generation of leaders.

Building a Ram Temple at the site has been one of the core promises of the BJP’s election manifestos for the last two decades, although the task was complicated by the underlying property dispute over who actually owned the land. In 2019, the Indian Supreme Court concluded that the land belonged to the ‘Hindu party’ – even though it conceded that the violent demolition of the mosque was an illegal act – and handed the area over to the central government to build a Ram Temple. The judgment was severely criticised for legal deficiencies, but nevertheless paved the way for Modi’s government to began construction on a grand temple.

Modi and the BJP could have nullified the legal dispute through an act of Parliament, but decided regardless to wait for the verdict from a court that has, over the last few years, struggled to maintain its independence from executive interference and repeatedly failed to act as a check on the government’s excesses, if only by letting vital cases go unheard for many years. The prime minister made no mention of the demolished mosque or India’s minorities in the speech following the ceremony, but did take the time to thank the court, saying “I express my gratitude to the Indian judiciary, which preserved the dignity of justice. The temple of Lord Ram, synonymous with justice, was also built in a fair manner.”

The temple ceremony and the prime minister’s speech drew together a number of threads that together make up the fabric of Modi’s India: The unabashed coupling of Hindu symbolism and Indian statehood, a singular narrative that claims to represent the aspirations of ‘all Indians; leaving little space for differing viewpoints, wilful ignorance of violence and illegal actions if committed in service of the party’s broader aims, and the willingness of elites across Indian society – from the business world to the judiciary – to fall in line with this overarching project.

There are (at least) three more elements worth examining here:

Electoral impact

The 2024 General Elections are just around the corner, most likely taking place in April and May. It should surprise no one that the Ram Temple is not actually complete, with construction now expected to conclude in December 2024. Few dispute that the timing of the ceremony has been unabashedly political, calculated to give Modi and his party an obvious narrative going into campaign season – with the election dates likely to be announced anytime now.

Will the temple affect the BJP’s electoral fortunes? The answer appears to be an emphatic yes. India rarely has reliable survey data on events like these and how they might change people’s opinions. But it has now become commonplace to talk of the BJP winning more than 400 out of 543 seats in the 2024 elections (up from the 303 it currently holds), a feat only once previously achieved in Indian history, then credited to the sympathy wave in favour of the Congress after former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984. One opinion poll found 52% of voters declaring that the inauguration of the temple would influence their choice at the polls.

This sense is amplified by the response from the Opposition. Despite knowing this event was coming for months, most opposition parties – which have united under a common banner with ‘I.N.D.I.A’ as their acronym – seemed unsure of how to respond to the openly political event. Most of these parties ultimately declined to turn up at the ceremony, decrying it as political opportunism from the prime minister, but failed to put forward any competing narrative, fearful of charges that they are anti-Hindu and insufficiently respectful towards Ram and his devotees.

Since then, the INDIA coalition has continued to flail, with internal dissension and the loss of one major politician this week: Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who has, over the last two decades remained in power by allying both with and against the BJP, this week returned to Modi’s alliance – more on that next week.

Narendra Modi, chosen by God

Modi’s personal image and stature has long been compared to – and constructed around – that of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The comparison is in the huge influence both have had over not just politics, but Indian society. The construction relies on using Nehru as a foil. Where India’s first prime minister took seriously the narrative tropes of secularism and the imagery of being equidistant from religions, Modi unabashedly embraces Hindu symbolism.

In part because ‘Mahatma’ Mohandas Gandhi and Deputy Prime Minister Sardar Patel died soon after independence, the early years of the Indian republic today and the shape it has broadly held since bear heavily the Nehruvian imprint, one with a preference for legal, constitutionalist narratives and a project that sought to define India’s civilisational uniqueness as emerging from the diversity of its people (no matter the inability of the state to live up to much of this rhetoric).

Last year, we spoke of how Modi’s installation of a Sengol – a traditional sceptre – in the new Parliament building made explicit the comparison between Modi and Nehru’s ideas of the Indian republic.

What the 'Sengol' ceremony tells us about the BJP and Modi's civilisational narrative

Nehru was famously uneasy with the idea of India’s ceremonial President being present at the spectacular opening of the Somnath Temple in 1951, for fears of what it might say about the secular character of the Indian state (in very different conditions, of course, given the horrors of Partition). The contrast with the role Modi took in the January 22 ceremony could not be more evident.

India’s current prime minister wasn’t just attending the event at Ayodhya in some perfunctory fashion. Modi was anointed the ‘mukhya yajman’ of the ceremony, making him responsible for presiding over the rituals. In the run-up to the event, he undertook an 11-day fast to cleanse himself, taking the opportunity to visit Hindu religious sites and temples around the country over that period. “God has chosen me to represent the people of India, as his instrument,” Modi said, in an official address ahead of the consecration.

If you couple that with Modi’s assertion, that this is a “temple of national consciousness”, it places India’s current prime minister in a divine category that no other Indian – never mind politician – can hope to compete with. It builds on the deliberate moulding of Modi’s image as “God’s gift to India”, a holy man who is content to disappear into a cave to meditate after an electoral campaign (as long as there are cameras to document and spread the images).

The implication of this image-building, ahead of an election campaign: How can anyone ask questions of someone chosen by God to represent Indians and lead India? Who will come in the way of the task laid out for the next millennium?

As Modi said, in his speech:

”The grand temple of Shri Ram has been built, what next? Today, I feel that the cycle of time is changing. From this sacred time, we have to lay the foundation of the India of the next thousand years… take an oath to build a strong, capable, grand and divine India from this very moment. Come, let us take a pledge that we will dedicate every moment of our lives to nation building… We have to offer our daily bravery, efforts and dedication to Lord Ram. With these we will have to worship Lord Ram daily, only then we will be able to make India prosperous and developed. This is the golden age of India’s development”

Civilisational Project

The expected electoral success as well as the deliberate intertwining of Hindu symbols and those of the state are what has prompted many observers to insist that what we are witnessing is a fundamental alteration of the nature of the Indian Republic. As Asim Ali puts it:

“The ubiquitous draping of religious paraphernalia accompanying the ceremony, much like the one that shrouded the inauguration of the new Parliament, are secondary objects of ornamental significance. The central significance of the moment lies in the reconfiguration of the dominant mode of ‘sovereignty’ undergirding the Indian nation-state. The constitutional republic of India had located the sovereignty of the Indian nation-state within the institution of Parliament and (by extension) within the body of the ‘people of India’ who elected Parliament…

We now have a new Parliament, inaugurated in a quasi-religious ceremony, where parliamentarians can be summarily suspended by the dozens. The Ayodhya ceremony must be viewed as the second important moment of Modi’s consecration of ‘electoral kingship’. Whereas the parliamentary ceremony effectively transferred de-facto sovereignty from Parliament to within the body of a sacralised supreme leader, the Ayodhya ceremony is meant to fuse this ‘electoral kingship’ with popular sovereignty where the notion of ‘people’ is indistinguishable from Hindu nationhood.”

This is part of the BJP’s broader civilisational project that aims to redefine India more clearly as a Hindu state, without necessarily having to change the constitution or institute a state religion. As we have discussed before, there are numerous elements and objectives to this project, from genuine efforts to rethink a post-colonial nation to attempts to nullify and absorb the other pole of Indian politics – social justice issues – to foreign policy aims that seek to give Modi’s India the space to undercut the traditional markers of liberal democracy, like a free press and an independent judiciary, by citing deep-seated civilisational values that the West cannot question.

Who can – or should – question 'Mother of Democracy' India?

The question for observers of Indian politics is, how much will this refashioning of the republic shift the ground beneath Indian feet? The Modi era has already successfully altered the terms of much of Indian politics – as is evident from the BJP’s success in Uttar Pradesh, which was once ground zero for social justice parties, for example – but much of that seems wound up in the personality, charisma and popular pull of the prime minister himself. Will this ‘electoral kingship’ reflect the nature of India’s prime ministerial candidates from hereon out? Is the state irrevocably changed?

Shekhar Gupta isn’t convinced:

“The most unexpected outcome of the Ayodhya event is how easily the many challengers to the Modi government and the BJP’s ideology have conceded defeat. Many fear the Republic is dead, or at least that the Republic they grew up with, built by the founders they so adore, no longer exists. That may partly be true, but it is in the nature of democracies that elected leaders can change their character and direction. If you disagree, it doesn’t mean it’s dead.

This Republic has been tempered through the agnipariksha of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency.

It just so happens that the political forces she locked up in her jails for up to 21 months subsequently showed the steel to redeem the Republic. It is their children and legatees who are now modifying and redefining some of its foundational principles. They can be challenged, just as Mrs Gandhi was in the 1970s.”

We’ll have more links to analysis from around the Indian space on the Ram Temple ceremony and its implications at the end of the week. If there were any pieces that you found particularly insightful, please send them in, either in the comments or by writing to rohan.venkat@gmail.com

Before, we go…

Can’t Make This Up