Tags:
Journalism of Courage
News agency ANI on Sunday (July 3) quoted senior BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad as saying that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said at the party’s national executive that “Hyderabad is Bhagyanagar, which is a significance for all of us”. The BJP’s national general secretary (Organisation) B L Santhosh tweeted that Modi had mentioned that “Sardar (Vallabhbhai Patel) gave us ‘Ek Bharath’ here in Bhagyanagar”.
The statements attributed to the Prime Minister have restarted conversations around an old BJP demand for renaming Hyderabad as Bhagyanagar.
In December 2020, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, while on a visit to Hyderabad ahead of municipal elections in the city, had visited the Bhagyalakshmi temple which, according to some BJP leaders, derives its name from Bhagyanagar, as Hyderabad was originally known.
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, who too was campaigning in Hyderabad, pitched for renaming the city, saying, “Some people were asking me if Hyderabad can be renamed as Bhagyanagar. I said — why not?”
Where is the Bhagyalakshmi temple?
The temple in question is a small shrine dedicated to Goddess Lakshmi, adjacent to the southeast minar of the iconic Charminar, the late 19th century monument located in the heart of the Old City of Hyderabad.
The southeast minar constitutes the back wall of the temple, which is made of bamboo poles and tarpaulin, and has a tin roof.
How old is this temple?
There is no definitive history of how and when the temple came up, but it has been there since at least the 1960s, when the current idol of the goddess is said to have been installed. The construction of the Charminar was begun in 1591 by Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, apparently to commemorate the end of the plague in his dominions — and according to Secunderabad MP G Kishan Reddy, the temple predates the monument.
Sources in the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), which is tasked with protecting the Charminar, had told The Indian Express earlier that the temple encroaches on the protective perimeter of the monument.
According to ASI officials, a small guard pillar erected to protect the monument from vehicles negotiating the roundabout on which it stands, was found painted saffron some time in the 1960s, and some people had started performing aarti there. After a state road transport bus accidentally hit the guard pillar and damaged it, a small structure made of bamboo was built overnight, and the idol of the goddess was placed under it.
Newsletter | Click to get the day’s best explainers in your inbox
“After that incident, the shrine started expanding by a foot or two during every festival until the High Court directed police to stop any expansion in 2013,” Congress leader Mohammed Shabbir Ali, who is a former Leader of Opposition in the Telangana Vidhan Parishad, had told The Indian Express in 2020.
Who visits the temple now?
A large number of Hindu traders and businessmen who have shops in Charminar area visit the temple daily. During festivals, especially Diwali, the temple attracts many devotees and sees long queues.
Devotees associate the name with their belief that praying to the goddess in the temple will bring them good luck and fortune.
On the other hand, Hindu political organisations associate the name of the goddess with Bhagyanagar, and claim that Hyderabad was earlier known as Bhagyanagar, but its name was changed to Hyderabad by the Qutbshahi rulers after they moved their capital here from Golconda.
When did the temple become a site of political contestation?
The old city of Hyderabad is communally sensitive, and the temple has been at the centre of communal tensions and violence since at least the 1970s.
In November 1979, after extremists seeking to overthrow the House of Saudi in Saudi Arabia seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM), the Hyderabad-based party that is now led by MP Asaduddin Owaisi, called for a bandh in the Old City of Hyderabad.
As Diwali was approaching, many Hindu shopkeepers requested the MIM to allow them to keep their shops open. This resulted in clashes, and the Bhagyalakshmi temple was attacked and desecrated.
A few years later, in September 1983, banners put up on the temple on the occasion of the Ganesh festival caused tensions after it was reported that the temple had expanded. Both the temple and the Allwyn mosque in the city were attacked by mobs.
In November 2012, clashes broke out after reports that the temple management was expanding it by replacing the bamboo structure with sheets. The Andhra Pradesh High Court had stepped in to halt all construction activity at the site.
Since when has the BJP sought to associate itself with the temple and the demands to rename Hyderabad after it?
A connection was sought to be established between the temple and the so-called Bhagyanagar especially around the time of the elections to the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation in 2020, when several BJP leaders visited the temple. Among the visitors was Amit Shah who, however, said he had gone only to seek the blessings of the goddess, and had denied that it was intended to make a statement.
However, following a political controversy regarding the distribution of flood relief around that time, the BJP’s Telangana chief Bandi Sanjay Kumar had dared leaders of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) to take an oath of truth before the goddess Bhagyalakshmi, and had subsequently visited the temple himself to swear to his side of the story with the goddess as witness.
Thereafter, ‘Bhagyanagar’ has come up in political discussions from time to time, and has received wide coverage during the BJP’s national executive in Hyderabad.
