RAM and the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya has been the most rewarding campaign for BJP, catapulting it to political hegemony in India’s contemporary political history. Ram, revered by many and attributed with divine quality, was part of the mythology which has been engrained among Hindu households over hundreds of years through the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas. We cannot have any dispute with this deification of Maryada Purushottam, as Ram has been described in Ramayana, one of the two epics in Indian mythology, and no one can quarrel with the personal faiths and beliefs of millions of Indians.
But the main trouble starts when faith is sought to be integrated with politics and governance. The November 25, programme at the newly constructed Ram temple witnessed fresh salvos being fired to consolidate that very process. The programme in which the ‘dharmadhwaj’ was installed atop the temple was signaled to flaunt as embodiment of the past, present and future of the country. Eleven years have elapsed since the BJP has been in office in the central government. Other electoral processes have also seen the consolidation of BJP capturing a number of state governments and most of the Constitutional entities in the country. The President, the Vice President, the Parliament, the Election Commission, and also important aspects of the judicial process have been sought to be used to rewrite the significance of Indian nationhood.
If careful scrutiny of Prime Minister Modi’s and the RSS chief Mohan Bhagawat’s speeches on the occasion of dhwajarohan is undertaken, it will become clear that there is a conscious effort to reduce our entire past, including the freedom struggle within the confines of the Rama legend. Modi blurted out “Today the infinite energy of Lord Shri Ram’s birthplace, the divine glory of Shri Ram’s family has been established in this most divine and grand temple in the form of dharmadhwaj” … “This dharmadhwaj is not just a flag. This is the flag of the renaissance of the Indian civilisation. Its saffron colour, the glory of Suryavamsha depicted on it, the inscribed om symbol, and the engraved kovidhara tree, represent the glory of Ramrajya. This flag is a resolve. This flag is success. This flag is the story of creation from struggle.”
It is obvious that the attempt is to subsume the identity of India as a nation, to the divine persona of Rama. The diversity of the Indian people, their unity forged in the crucible of struggle against British colonial domination, are all consigned to irrelevance. The struggle of the people for a decent livelihood, for accessing basic necessities of life like food, clothing, shelter and essential prerequisites of education and health, to stand up in the comity of nations are all irrelevant before the process of deification and divinity. One may cut back to the entire controversy and subsequent debate around the inauguration function at Ayodhya one year back, when some of the Sankaracharyas had seriously raised their objections against the Prime Minister hogging the central role and politics encroaching the realm of religion.
In India and elsewhere in the world, religion and politics maintain an arm’s length and democracies thrive on the principle of governance by, of and for the people. There is no necessity to enter the question of divinity, but there are many faiths and beliefs in this country which may not be equally enamoured by this apparent complementarity between the divine and public governance. Political parties are obligated to offer concrete policy directions and specific measures for the benefit of the people, irrespective of their class, caste, creed, religion etc. The principle of accountability ensures delivery of those promises and governments are evaluated on the basis of the experience of those deliveries.
However, it seems from the tenor of the address made by the Prime Minister in Ayodhya, that there is no significance for standing up to that scrutiny. He stated in plain words “This dharmadhwaj will make us resolve – nahin daridra kou dukhi na deena, meaning we build a society where there is no poverty, no one is unhappy or helpless.” It was incumbent on the Prime Minister to spell out how poverty or unhappiness or helplessness could be banished forever. That cannot surely be achieved by lauding this wholesome praise on Lord Rama and the dharmadhwaj. The government will have to explain how such a goal can be achieved, with rising inequality, poverty and unemployment.
Prime Minister Modi also referred to the colonial era introduction of English as a medium of instruction by Thomas Macaulay in 1835. Macaulay’s idea of colonial education was a product of British imperialist consideration. To eliminate that, the British had to be defeated. The RSS supremo Mohan Bhagawat was equally glib about the dharmadhwajarohan ceremony as a moment of “immense historical, emotional and spiritual significance”. However, he did not elaborate on how the RSS which has been the moving force for BJP and particularly Prime Minister Modi, a self-professed pracharak of the Sangh, has contributed towards fighting and defeating the British to establish an independent forward-looking India, where these very goals of eliminating “poverty, unhappiness and helplessness” could be achieved.
In fact, in one of his recent remarks in Nagpur, Mohan Bhagawat has attacked Gandhi for his remarks in Hind Swaraj at the very beginning of the twentieth century, where he had pointed out that there is no permanent enmity between the Hindus and the Muslims. Such differences existed because the British rulers had wanted it that way. However, the fight against the British forged the unity of the two communities. In the RSS’s predicament of not being able to locate the organisation in the struggle for freedom and the achievement of independence, when it is celebrating its centenary, its sole effort is to fake that India became independent not on the 15th of August 1947, but only when the Ram temple was inaugurated. Therefore, the divine must subsume the reality.
It is a life and death issue for the people of India to fight the real world, where promotion of corporate cronyism and the consequent corruption is eating into our very vitals. It is a struggle to safeguard the interests of our millions of peasants and agricultural workers who find it difficult to ensure two square meals a day. It is a struggle to achieve the goals of universal elementary education when government schools are closing down in their thousands. It is a struggle for our young men and women to secure the right to work and livelihood and become positive contributors in the wellbeing of their families and the nation. This battle cannot be fought without taking on the RSS project of redefining the nationhood of the country and consigning the material agonies and ecstasies through this orchestrated loyalty to divinity. This is not to mean any disrespect, but recognition of the real world. We must rededicate ourselves to that struggle.
(December 03, 2025)
