The mystique of religion flounders here; spirituality hurries to take a back seat in New India’s new Ayodhya. Today the most striking visual of that ancient town where the devout have thronged for centuries can said to be unabashed contractor capitalism running hard to make it count in case the bubble bursts all too soon.
Unseen hands of contractors and management from the state of Gujarat appear to be just about everywhere in the jobs to be executed, overriding local sentiment, with the river Sarju as a mute witness. On its banks are now moored cruise boats for the anticipated rush of the fancy tourist, not the paddle boats of the humble Kewat, the tribe of fisherfolk and boatmen who once had the ear of Lord Ram, the King of Ayodhya, as the Ramayan suggests.
Although this cannot be formally acknowledged, it is quite plain that the sovereign body in Ayodhya is not the government of Uttar Pradesh – even if the chief minister is a mahant (Hindu priest) – but the Sri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust or SRJTK. It is an autonomous body created in 2020 under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s guidance in line with the Supreme Court ruling of November 2019 which handed over the title of the land under the demolished Babri mosque to the same set that was castigated by the apex court in sharp terms for destroying the mosque.
This trust is charged with overseeing the construction of the Ram temple around the site of the former Babri Masjid, pulled down with human hands in 1992 by surcharged mobs high on the opium of religion and guided by the BJP’s then top leadership. It is also entrusted with the improvement of Ayodhya with an eye to turning it into a Hindu Vatican or Mecca and a mammoth tourist attraction. Bulging tourism revenue is on the government’s and Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s mind.
VHP vice-president Champat Rai is the SRJTK general secretary and calls the shots in the new temple’s management. The VHP is an affiliate of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The most influential entity for Ayodhya, however, is the chairman of the construction committee of the SRJTK, Nripendra Misra. He served as the principal secretary to the prime minister in his first term and is now serving, in post-retirement capacity, a post of exceeding importance which involves dealing with the country’s top engineering and consultancy firms rather extensively. In effect, Modi’s PMO runs Ayodhya, a very special project high on the regime’s ideological and potential revenue-index.
The sums projected are impressive. According to a Mint report of January 23, the brokerage Jefferies “has recently estimated that a $ 10 billion makeover of Ayodhya with a new airport, revamped railway station, township and road connectivity will likely drive a multiplier effect with new hotels and other economic activities. It could attract 50 million tourists a year.” Activities under the Ayodhya Masterplan have a time horizon that extends to 2031. Real estate is the name of the game. It has rarely had it so good.
There is probably no way to test such an exuberant projection, but context helps. Agra’s world famous Taj Mahal nets some six million tourists annually in contrast, and there are other sites of historical and architectural wonder in its vicinity. If Ayodhya were to raise eight or 10 times that number, it will probably have to upstage the tourist arrivals of several leading international destinations taken together.
Also read: Delirium Over Ram Mandir: A Nation Consecrated or Desecrated?
Faizabad district – now renamed Ayodhya in a burst of religiosity – with its principal town of the same name, was the original seat of the Oudh (Awadh) nawabs, who later transferred themselves to Lucknow. The city thus has a flavour of that past. Otherwise, the entire district and those around it constitute the agricultural hinterland of this region of Uttar Pradesh. In this backwater, industry (MSME and large included) has an annual turnover of under Rs 25 crore, according to relatively recent data of Union MSME ministry, and a workforce of about 30,000. A generally poor area has been dragged into the 21st century, as is the story in most of India.
Can a standalone, modern temple of a particular faith, thus lacking universal appeal, in a relatively less developed part of the country, sustain the massive multiplier effect projections that are based on international tourist arrivals, presumably made up in large measure of well-heeled NRIs? Fancy hotels, glittering airport, and a very modern large railway facility, in a backward region that may offer little demand support, appear somewhat incongruous.
The government has drummed up support to transport people to Ayodhya from various parts of the country in the weeks following the Ram temple consecration by Modi on January 22. The buzz is that ruling party MPs ad MLAs have been assigned quotas to send to Ayodhya.
The railways have laid out fast trains called “Astha” (faith) specials. Many passengers seem genuinely simple, religious folk, others like mobilised political cadres. Members of a VHP group from western India said each of them paid Rs 1,800/- for the train journey both ways and one day’s stay in a comfortable tent city, erected to meet the needs of state-inspired religiosity. The railways have slashed all concessions in fares, including for senior citizens. But the neo-pilgrims mobilized for the Ayodhya campaign appear to have benefited from moderated fares. Hundreds of trains are expected to run till the end of the financial year.
Probably the most conspicuous local grumble this writer encountered during a recent visit to Ayodhya concerned the contractors. Perhaps this was a more vocal grumble than the vociferous complaints of people’s homes and small businesses bulldozed to widen roads in the entire temple complex of Ayodhya.
We came across guards of a security company from Gujarat called “Kavach” charged with managing a section of the river ghat. According to one complaint, even labour (who appeared to be tribal people) were transported from Gujarat to work on some cable-laying beneath roads. Has Uttar Pradesh exhausted its capacity to supply even the basics to mount an effort to modernise itself? The question and its implication hangs in the air.
Guided to its final moments on January 22, Modi inaugurated an unfinished temple, practically on the eve of the national elections, with a rousing speech linking religion with nation in the presence of India’s business, film, and sports stars. Those who were noticeably absent were the ordinary Ram devotees of the ancient town of Ayodhya. The project that surreptitiously commenced in 1949 with the insertion of an idol of Ram inside a 500-year old mosque was at last complete.
History reminds us that Hitler too had ordered a “one thousand year Reich”. But where does this leave Ram? This is a moment of small triumph for political Hinduism – the unveiling of the unfinished temple, touted in BJP’s national convention in New Delhi last month as a singular “achievement”, an unleashing of the (doubtless Hindu) nation’s “consciousness”, a harbinger of “one thousand years of Ram Rajya”.
The story of Ram is traditionally cherished in every Hindu home. His love of all beings, his poise even in war, his thoughtfulness for his people, even at the expense of disregarding his wife Seeta, his glowing beauty, and the beauty of his actions which gets culturally underlined as the metric for performance of duty, are celebrated as popular theatre in the form of Ramaleela across the villages, towns and cities of North India.
In recognition of this, the Muslim poet and future philosopher of Pakistan, Mohammed Iqbal, had given on Ram the title of Imam-e-Hind. That Ram appears to have gone missing in Ayodhya in the time of Modi.
The pilgrim, the true Ram devotee, apt to have been brought up to conjure the gentle, almost boy-like, divine image of Ram in the manner made immortal by the sage Valmiki in his Ramayan (probably around 2000 years ago), or the much later Ramcharitmanas of Goswami Tulsi Das (late 16th century), stands stupefied by the sights and high-decibel tawdry sounds of a construction and religious tourist capitalism in the first gear.
In an article, Deity to Crusader: The Changing Iconography of Ram, theatre scholar Anuradha Kapur writes: “Icons seek to represent what are believed to be the essential features of a deity. Traditional iconography tended to represent Ram, Janani and Lakshman smiling serenely. Emblematically, the figures represented tranquility, compassion, the shanta rasa. The images now available…Whatever else it might be, the rasa in these images is not shanta. [But] so far as iconographical features are concerned, there are certain commonalities of representation…..what these several Rams share are the attributes of a sympathetic god, attributes which are his alone….he is serene and ever-forgiving; he is ever-youthful, boyish almost, with a conspicuous lack of masculine power; and yet, he is the lord of the universe, the maryada purushottam.”
The pilgrim cannot but also regard with some anxiety – and with thoughts of deviation from the path – the New Ram in the New Ayodhya of New India, presented on the new walls as murals depicting a ferocious Hindu warrior, possibly even a hunter, the defender of a ferocious nationalism. In 21st century India, is Ram going to be cyclostyled as a politician?
Anand K. Sahay is a political commentator based in New Delhi.
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