Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to visit the Matua temple at Orkandi later this month when he travels to Dhaka. He had also started his 2019 election campaign in West Bengal by seeking the blessing of Boro Maa, the head of Matua sect. The Matua is one of the largest Dalit communities of West Bengal, which migrated from East Bengal after Partition. Similarly, the party invokes Lord Birsa Munda (Bhagwan Birsa) in the Adivasi belt these days. In Bengal, we see the BJP constantly extending its political influence by assimilating left-out and marginal communities in various ways. These actions point to the BJP’s attempts to expand its footprint by including new gods and goddesses in its pantheon.
For instance, the campaign to interpret the local history of Arunachal Pradesh in Hindu religious terms started in the 1960s. The memories of Bali, Sugriva, Parashuram and Sita are being recreated to associate tribal communities of this region with the broader Hindutva fold. The localisation of icons of Ramayana and Mahabharata by linking them with local hills and rivers is being tried to foster Hindutva memories. The memory of the Bhakti movement is providing the base for strengthening Hindutva in Assam. Sabari, a minor character in the Ramayana and a popular deity of a few marginal and nomadic communities in Northern India, is invoked to reach out to them. Atal Nagar, a basti of the Jaya Pura, near Varanasi, built especially for the Musahar community, now has a temple of Sabari Mata. The Musher people consider this temple their pride: “We had no temple of mata sabari in and around 50 kms. Modiji made this temple for us.” Recently, Narendra Modi invoked a local deity — Mari Mai — worshipped extensively in central and eastern UP. In villages, we find “than” (mounds) of Mari mai under the peepal, which are worshipped by rural women.
Clearly, the BJP has moved ahead of the Ram narrative and added many smaller and local deities and icons in its religious-political pantheon. Hindutva politics seeks to provide religious pride to marginal communities, an important aspect of their social dignity.
Most of the icons explored by the BSP in UP in the 1990s to mobilise the Dalits and other marginal communities are being appropriated by the BJP. Kanshi Ram, founder of the BSP, had painstakingly worked on these to form social alliances that helped to strengthen the Bahujan movement.
The BJP politics is not merely limited to the mobilisation of people as people-body, crowds, or voters. It extends to the mobilisation of religion-culture based identity resources. Without the political capital of identity resources, the power and range of political parties to mobilise and make communities as a long-term mass base will weaken. Losing claims on the identity resources of people, in the long run, will cost a political party its mass base. Conversely, when any party starts to slip, it loses grip on its capital of community identity icons and symbols which it had gathered when political prospects were on the ascent.
This column first appeared in the print edition on March 18, 2021 under the title ‘Extending the Pantheon’. The writer is professor, Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute, Allahabad
