BJP looks for breakthrough | Hindutva with a Bengali accent

It was supposed to be a soiree celebrating the birth anniversaries of two great Bengali poets—Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam—in the sprawling nat mandir (dance hall) of Radha Govinda Jiu temple at Nabadwip, in West Bengal’s Nadia district. But, an hour before its start on May 24, amidst sudden commotion, the organisers were made to remove a picture of Nazrul and delete his name from the title—Rabindra-Nazrul Sandhya—by temple authorities. Later, it emerged they had bowed to ‘pressure’ from the BJP, who did not appreciate the celebration of a Muslim poet in a Hindu temple space.The targeting of Nazrul by the BJP has a history. As an icon who in many ways bridges the religious chasm that has scarred Bengal, he may not be particularly easy to villainise, but typifies the culture of exchange and reciprocity the party tends to look askance at. So it was entirely in character when, during the 1999 Lok Sabha campaign, Bengal BJP leader Tapan Sikdar disparaged him as a “modhyo-medhar Mussalman kobi” (a second-rate Muslim poet). To that extent, the basic instinct is familiar from other saffron laboratories: go hard at spaces and figures of syncretism who create a climate opposite to one conducive to Hindutva. But under that broad umbrella, the BJP’s ongoing advance into West Bengal politics has been seeing a perceptible shift—a conscious tactical adaptation to the local habitus.Over a decade, the BJP’s shrill denunciation of the Trinamool Congress (TMC)—especially for “appeasement of Muslims”—had been partly compromised by the kind of Hindutva it espoused. It had a distinct north Indian flavour—revolving around clangorous processions on Hanuman Jayanti and Ramnavami, not deities with as high a currency in Gangetic Bengal as they have upriver in the north. Along with this was an uncomfortable cultural distance from Bengal’s own religious traditions—more aligned to Shaktism, with the primary veneration of figures like Durga and Kali, not to speak of attendant sacrificial rituals and blanket non-vegetarianism. This is what enabled chief minister Mamata Banerjee to lay the “outsider” charge on them with such rhetorical force during the 2021 assembly election campaign, as she played her own nativist politics. But a new emphasis had been already emerging: this involves picking up and coopting themes native to Bengal, dredging out from its landscape half-forgotten temples and rituals, hyperlocal traditions and autochthonous deities reimagined in mainstream ‘Hindu’ ways, even inventing ‘ancient’ pilgrimages. That this revivalist strategy goes with a stealthy parading of mosques or other monuments allegedly built after demolishing temples during the Bengal Sultanate is par for the Hindutva course.Search for a Kumbh MelaIn a bid to stake a claim to things both inherently ‘Bengali’ and ‘Hindu’, the BJP is engaged in ferreting out places with a naturalistic claim to antiquity. One of them is the Tribeni sangam in Hooghly district, where the Bhagirathi Hooghly, one of the branches of the main Ganga, splits into three distributaries named Ganga (Hooghly), Jamuna and Saraswati. The BJP claims this was a site of a local Kumbh mela till one Zafar Khan Ghazi, whose 13th-century dargah and mosque stand nearby, allegedly put an end to it. This year, both the Union culture ministry and the TMC—unwilling to let go of any beneficial symbolism—spent crores to revive the pilgrimage. Prime Minister Narendra Modi too referenced it in his February 26 Mann Ki Baat. The BJP rests its claim of historicity on scholarly research. One document it cites is Canadian anthropologist Alan Morinis’s 1979 Ph.D. thesis, where he mentions Tribeni as a pilgrimage site in antiquity, though not a Kumbh. In a May 18 op-ed piece in The Telegraph, Morinis responded thus, “Someone with an agenda got hold of my dissertation and reworded the page where I discuss Tribeni to say what they wanted to say, not what I had written based on my years of research.” He added that such “doctored documents” and “falsified research” to give the campaign a “higher level of sanctity and importance like a Kumbh” is being done to suit the political ends of “Hindu supremacists”.The BJP-RSS is undaunted. Prof. Mohit Ray of Jadavpur University, convenor of the state BJP refugee cell, says Bangladeshi author Ghulam Murshid’s book Bengali Culture: Over a Thousand Years mentions Tribeni as a Hindu centre. “Where have the temples gone when the area is known by locals as Vishnu mandir? The murals on the mosque have embellishments similar to those found in temples,” says Ray. There are those who hew towards this view. Says Sheikh Maqbul Islam, associate professor, St Paul’s Cathedral Mission College, “As a junction of rivers, there’s a high probability of Tribeni having been the site of an auspicious mela in the past. During my research, I discovered an antique Jagannath deity in that area. Probably the Vishnu reference comes from that.” TMC Rajya Sabha MP Jawhar Sircar, however, is sceptical. “A small mela has been held at the trijunction, as happens at every sangam, but never a Kumbh, which happens only at Haridwar, Prayag, Ujjain and Nashik, according to tradition. It’s inane to claim a Kumbh for Tribeni,” he says.Right in the heart of Kolkata, the BJP and its cohorts have discovered two old ‘Hindu’ strands they think are ripe for revival—both from well beyond the ambit of mainstream savarna Hinduism. One is the Chowringheenath temple of the Nath tradition, the other a site presumed to have had an iteration of a tortoise-shaped deity named Dharma Thakur, mostly associated with the poorer castes of western Bengal. “The Naths are a part-Shaivite stream. The local Naths are originally from Noakhali and Sandwip island (in Chittagong, Bangladesh) who migrated to the South 24 Parganas and the Sunderbans long ago,” says Maqbul Islam. The BJP demands recognition for the Chowringheenath temple, now lying in an obscure corner of the city’s main thoroughfare, J.L. Nehru Road, earlier called Chowringhee Road. A return to the old name must accompany renovation, it says. There’s also a move to change the name of Kolkata’s Esplanade to Dharmatala—already the name of a neighbouring area—after the tortoise-shaped (or often aniconic) Dharma deity. Prasad Maharaj, a Hindu priest, points to a huge pond in Dharmatala that has four temple-like structures on its corners. “They could have once served as a Dharma temple. We are trying to revive the religious sanctity of this place by changing the names from Esplanade and Lenin Sarani to Dharmatala and by organising a congregation of one lakh preachers and Gita chanting this year,” he says. That the Dharma cult has an umbilical link to castes like the Doms, kept outside the periphery of the varna order or high Puranic Hinduism, is a paradox that homogenising Hindutva breezes over. That’s why Prasanta Ray, professor emeritus at Presidency University, calls the BJP’s Hindutva a political construct and says, “We cannot locate the Hinduism we know in the BJP’s Hinduism.”Calendar propagandaAll this search for new roots goes hand in hand with an old, patented tactic. In 2020, the Hindu Samhati Mancha, a Hindutva outfit, came up with a calendar featuring 12 Sultanate-era structures of Bengal, one for each month, that were allegedly built after razing Hindu landmarks. Each page had a snapshot of the structure’s pre-Islamic ‘history’. For example, recalling the P.N. Oak-style rebranding of Delhi’s Qutub Minar, it styles the Pandua Minar in Hooghly, a tower said to commemorate the victory of military leaders Sufiuddin and Sharafuddin over a local Hindu king, as a ‘Shakti Peetha’. Similarly, it claims the Adina Masjid in Malda came up on the site of a demolished Adinath temple in 1368. Debtanu Bhattacharya of the Mancha says the calendar aims to create “awareness”. Asked if there are plans to rebuild or restore temples on these sites, he was diplomatic. “Sanatan dharma talks of universal humanism butâæthe majoritarian mood we see today is the outburst of suppressed emotions for being victims of aggression,” he says.Beyond this, the BJP has decided to embrace and sponsor not just big Durga and Kali pujas, many of which are largely under Trinamool control, but hyperlocal ones like the pujas to Rakkhya Kali and Ratanti Kali in Hooghly, Sraboni mela in Tarakeswar, the Chaitra Sankranti Gajan mela in Malda, those related to the Poush and Makar Sankrantis, and the Tusu-Bhadu and Hul utsavs of various castes, tribal groups and the Rajbongshis of north Bengal. The RSS has been making inroads into Rajbongshi spaces with sangkirtans. “We are targeting Dalits and Adivasis who often cohabit with Muslims,” says a party leader. “With our association, we give them a feeling of being under our protective wings.” DJ boxes become part of the inventory of assertion in such spaces. But often enough, this activation of the field is accomplished at one remove. “Our leadership wants us to explore the rural constituencies. But we don't come in the picture directly. Small local groups and NGOs organise festivals, sports events, picnics and such like. We offer sponsorship and other assistance,” says the leader.Cinematic saffron Related to this propagandist surge, several films are primed to further the BJP’s agenda in Bengal. Written and produced by Jitendra Narayan Singh, The Diary of West Bengal talks of the displacement of Hindus in the face of “minority appeasement” by the TMC. The trailer highlights clips where the protagonist, styled after Mamata with no pretension to allegorical finesse, mouths her popular khela hobe (‘game’s on’) slogan. And a film on the ‘great Calcutta killing’ of August 1946 is expected to be directed by Vivek Agnihotri of Kashmir Files fame. A film on ‘Gopal Patha’ or Gopal Chandra Mukhopadhyay, who played a significant role by saving Hindus on Direct Action Day in August 1946, is also in the works—posing the question, as it were, on why a man who should have been considered a Hindu icon was forced into oblivion by successive governments of Bengal. Expect many of these questions—from culture and religion—to be swirling in the air as Bengal inches closer to the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, where the central BJP is eyeing half of its 42 seats.Published By: Shyam BalasubramanianPublished On: Jun 9, 2023--- ENDS ---

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