Published as a cover story in Open magazine in the second week of April 2015
Also featured on The Huffington Post
Also featured on The Huffington Post
‘He wanted to be able to tell someone of his suspicion that man had made their gods and not the other way around. He wanted to be able to say, it is man at the centre of things, not God. It is man at the heart and the bottom and the top, man at the front and the back and the side, man the angle and the devil, the miracle and the sin, man and always man, and let us henceforth have no other temples but those dedicated to mankind. This was his most unspeakable ambition: to found the religion of man.’
- Mughal Emperor Akbar, speaking through Salman Rushdie
My first brush with
political deification was on the day ‘tiger’ became extinct. On November 17,
2012, Balasaheb Thackeray, then the Shiv Sena supremo who was nicknamed after the national animal, succumbed to a cardiac arrest. At the time, I was a cub
reporter working with a Mumbai-based newspaper. It was a golden opportunity to
cover news of such a magnitude.
Emotions were running
high. Over the next few days, as I witnessed the politics and the chaos, I lost
count of the number of times I heard of the departed leader being equated to a
divine entity. “He was like our God,” countless people from all over the city
and the state who I met the next day at his funeral told me.
While one might argue to
the contrary, for someone with a front-row ticket to the events unfolding, all
the indicators were well in place. Minutes after the announcement of his demise,
I saw the sandwich seller near my
office at Nariman Point, like all god-fearing men, pack up his wares and run
for an ark to take him to safer havens. Towards the evening, shops and offices
across the city were vacuumed clean of the atheists who dared to earn a
livelihood.
In a matter of days, a
memorial came up on the playground used to cremate Thackeray’s body. The Sena foot
soldiers and sympathizers queued up with garlands, incense sticks and attended
the bhajan programs held every
evening. You couldn’t afford to be in two minds about Thackeray’s stature. For an
agnostic, an obituary in the party mouthpiece Saamna was ready to help:
‘God had sent the Shiv Sena leader for the welfare of the
world… Perhaps, the Gods found themselves in a crisis that he (Thackeray) was
recalled to the heavens.’
To me, it was never
difficult to accept him in the Hindu pantheon, crowded as it may be with over
330 million gods and goddesses. In the recent years, more were being added to
the list to keep up with the demand anyway—the Visa temple in Hyderabad, the
Aeroplane gurudwara in Jalandhar, the Bike temple in Rajasthan and the Dog
temple in Karnataka, each of them catering to a distinct kind of mannat-asking devotees.
One of the earliest
instances of the trend was the temple of the late MG Ramachandran in
Tiruvallur, recalls social scientist Shiv Visvanathan. In the course of his
career as an anthropologist, he has visited a number of such temples, including
the one for MGR, the Tamil cinema superstar who played the role of Chief
Minister off-screen for nearly 15 years. “On one occasion, MGR was having a
cool drink and left it unfinished. The remains were sprinkled on the ground as
holy water. Just like the woman who made the temple in his honour, there were
others who thought of him as a holy man,” says Visvanathan. “In India, we often
think of politicians as miracle-makers. To a certain extent, what we have is a
form of hero worship. But it doesn’t last very long.”
Even among gods, there
is a hierarchy. It can start with a stone with a dash of saffron, a sacred
grove or the humble shrine of a holy man, and go all the way till the
major-league players of Kedarnath and Tirupati. Some persist; others go out of
circulation as soon as they stop drinking milk. Visvanathan says that the
reason he finds it easy to see politicians find place among them is that the
Hindu pantheon can be extraordinarily accommodating.
Others are less forgiving
of the trend. Dalit-activist and political commentator Chandra Bhan Prasad sees
a pattern in the personalities who have temples springing up in their name.
“What I find strange is that nobody makes a temple for a politician who has
fallen,” he says.
Prasad’s observation makes
for a strong case. In 2008, when a Jodhpur-based priest proposed turning BJP
leader Vasundhara Raje into Goddess Annapurna, she was the Chief Minister of
Rajasthan. Two years later, a Vellore-based DMK worker declared his intention
of exalting his party chief and then Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu M Karunanidhi
to divine status after he was apparently impressed by his “pro-poor welfare
measures”. Recently, Samajwadi Party leader Azam Khan went on record to say
that his party head and three-time Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mulayam Singh
Yadav, too, deserves a temple of his own.
“When you are making
temples for such people, you stand to gain something in terms of public
attention. It’s an exceptional form of greed,” says Prasad, “For instance, can
you think of anyone wanting to make a temple for Manmohan Singh now?”
Prasad cites the example
of the temple of ‘Goddess English’ that he is in the process of erecting in UP.
It is dedicated to English education as a tool of empowerment for the masses.
He makes a pitch for building new temples in honour of ideas instead of
personalities. Borrowing from a BJP slogan, he says, “If you are to build one
for Narendra Modi, why not make it a ‘Sabka Saath, Sabka
Vikaas’ temple?”
Oblivious to such
suggestions, by the second week of February, a certain Shankarbhai Manubhai
Patel, resident of Kothariya village in Rajkot, had distributed hundreds of
invitation cards announcing the inauguration of this Modi temple that he had
set up over the last few months. 40-year-old Patel, a leader of the BJP’s youth
wing and a tea-seller, as Modi once was, had been worshipping a portrait of the
Prime Minster at his residence for nearly nine years. He had reportedly spent
Rs. 1.7 lakh on a statue made by a sculptor from Orissa.
It wasn’t long before
the news caught the imagination of the national media. On the morning of 12
February, when Patel switched on his TV set, he realised that his god had taken
to Twitter to say that he was ‘sad’ and ‘appalled’ to hear about the proposed
temple in his honour. Patel was gobsmacked.
When powerful men are spurned,
the efficiency of the damage control mechanism that swings into action is heart-warming.
In the time it takes one to get nostalgic about the beloved buffaloes of Azam
Khan, the local collector armed himself with evidence of the temple encroaching
over a government land and instructed for its removal. Patel and his associates
had little say in the matter. They tried anyway.
“We felt pained that we hurt sentiments of our ‘God’ (Modi)
and after his displeasure we have covered his idol installed at the temple,”
Ramesh Undhad, a part of the core group, told The Times of India. The rubble
was dumped in the backyard of Patel’s house and the idol stashed away, far from
the prying flashbulbs.
 |
| A poster of Swatch Bharat Abhiyaan, one of BJP government's pet initiatives, has come up near the place earlier marked for Modi's temple in Rajkot |
***
Modi’s was not the first
temple to a politician in India, nor was Patel the first to idolise him so
literally. That crown goes to the Namo Namo Mandir in Uttar Pradesh where a
member of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a religious right-wing organisation
with close links to the BJP, has been worshipping an idol of Modi. While a
number of proposed temples for politicians either lie abandoned or are in
various stages of completion, it isn’t too difficult to find instances of
temples to Sonia Gandhi, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Mahatma Gandhi.
In the last two weeks of
March, as I packed my bags, strapped on a camera and journeyed across five
states to each of the shrines of the hallowed leaders, the ruminations of the
Mughal emperor Akbar, as fed by Salman Rushdie in one of his works, kept coming
back to me. There were several
chronicles of such attempts made by man for his kind. I was simply the pilgrim.
Bharat
Ratna in a Box:
Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh
 |
| The Mudgal family that stays opposite the Atal temple in Gwalior have taken it upon themselves to worship the former PM who lies unattended to in the small shrine for most part of the day |
The man with a nuclear
bomb to his credit cuts a lonely figure. In his box-shaped sanctum, separated
from the street by an eight-foot wall, Atal Bihari Vajpayee is a postcard sized
photograph with a pack of incense sticks for company. In his vicinity is
Hindimata, the goddess of Hindi, housed in a temple of similar dimensions. A pulped
sedan forms the backdrop of the premises.
The Vajpayee temple is
located at Satyanarayan tekri in
Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh. It came up 15 years ago, ostentatiously for the
politician’s work for the cause of his mother tongue. A four-storied mall-like
temple stands opposite Vajpayee’s, one that packs Lord Shiva, Vishnu and
Krishna with their respective consorts within its walls. The keys to the Atal
shrine lie with the priests of this temple.
“We do it because he has
been the leader of the nation. We think he is a Brahmin like us, a senior
leader, a son of Gwalior,” says Pramod Mudgal. His family adopted the shrine
years ago, ever since they found that the priests in charge of it were doing
little for its upkeep.
While the locals of the tekri are familiar with the temple, I see
no visitors or passers-by take a moment for Vajpayee. As the blazing sun turns
its knobs down, sitting in the courtyard of Mudgal’s residence, we discussed the
apathy of the people, including that of the founder of the temple Vijay Singh
Chauhan, an advocate in Gwalior high court.
“He comes once in
several months. In the rains, he will come and go about a plantation drive. He
does it every year but somehow, no tree comes up,” Mudgal chuckled. “But
photographs will be clicked and they will appear in the newspapers.”
The same drill is
followed on the birth anniversary of Vajpayee on 25th December. One
such consequence published in the Hindi daily Dainik Bhaskar was what had
become my point of reference in the days leading up to the visit.
Every evening, 14-year
old Shubham Mudgal, a student of a local convent school, and his grandfather
take turns to worship Vajpayee. Due to a tiff between the caretaker priests and
the Mudgals, the gates are seldom open around the pooja time. Undeterred, Shubham, along with a cousin, scales the
wall and places a diya and incense sticks in front of the deity.
The irony isn’t easy to dodge:
the torchbearer of Hindi being worshipped by a student of English.
 |
| Advocate Vijay Singh Chauhan (R), the founder of the Vajpayee temple, at his office in Gwalior |
I am to meet Chauhan the
next day around noon. Two hours after our scheduled appointment, Chauhan
saunters in wearing black robes, accompanied by a few clients and a friend clad
in khaki. He orders tea and roasted gram for his patrons, and proceeds to rinse
his mouth with tobacco. A few minutes later, he notices me tucked away in a
corner.
Chauhan, 52, is
president of the Uttar Rashtriya Abhibhashak Manch, an outfit that works—among
other things—for the promotion of Hindi. Once a year, he hosts a small
gathering within the Vajpayee temple premises, where invitees sing praises of
Lord Rama through bhajans. He does not offer me any explanation for his
adopted god lying ignored for the rest of the year, and instead, describes his
ambitious plans of filing petitions to force the government to convert the
temple into a tourist hotspot.
Like the temple’s de-facto
priest, Chauhan says he doesn’t think of the leader as a god. “But a person who
is a Prime Minister is not an ordinary man,” he says, “Any person who reaches
that level is not ordinary. He has to be extraordinary.”
The structure and idol
of the former Prime Minister cost Rs 5 lakh, the expenses borne by the Manch.
But there were murmurs of protests about worshipping the idol of a living
person, after which he claims to have immersed the idol in five rivers and
journeyed from Gwalior to New Delhi on foot to gift it to the Prime Minister
himself.
“The whole country saw
it. It was written about a lot,” he tells me. “A person out only for publicity
wouldn’t work so hard.”
The
Disciple of The Disciple:
Kaushambi, Uttar Pradesh
 |
| Since more than a year, every morning and evening, priest Brijendranath Mishra, who set up the Modi idol, has been worshipping Narendra Modi |
After crossing the once
dreaded ravines of Chambal, I wind up at Allahabad to find a lovelorn
population that lay in store. Throughout the bumpy ride to Bhagwanpur, the buses
and tempos played the one sentiment over the course of their playlist: that of
the sanams turning out to be bewafaas. By the time I reached my
destination – a village in 60 km away from Allahabad – I was a morose man conditioned
to rue the cruelties of the fairer sex.
At a mobile store on its
outskirts, I meet Chandrakant Dwivedi, a resident of the village. A jovial man
in his early twenties, Dwivedi escorts me on his motorcycle to the door of
Brijendranath Mishra, the priest of the local Namo Namo temple. Though
acquainted with the family, Dwivedi shies away from greeting the Mishras.
“They don’t like me too
much,” he tells me.
As I step off the dusty
lanes into my host’s residence, his resemblance to Narendra Modi nearly made me
halt in my tracks. Mishra’s beard is cropped to perfect imitation, the mat of
his hair parting. He wears wearing a saffron gamcha over his saffron kurta that ended where a loose white dhoti took
over. In the courtyard of his house stands a 300-year-old temple of Lord Shiva,
known as a ‘Namo Namo Mandir’ ever since a statue of Narendra Modi came up in
front of the lingam.
“It is a Shiv temple,” Mishra
insisted, before citing one of his poems to buttress his argument: “Yeh Namo Namo mandir Shiv Shiv hai japta
(This Namo Namo temple prays to lord Shiva).”
Mishra sounds acutely
aware that his theatrics had got him onto national television during last
year’s General Election season. As I stroll around, he recites the numerous
poems he has written as odes to Narendra Modi for the benefit of a visibly
uninterested acquaintance, who buries his head in a newspaper. The poetry has
familiar motifs: terror, Kashmir, the Ganga, the tricolour and soldiers posted
on the frontlines. The bottomline: omnipotent Modi would save all.
After the failed Modi
temple launch at Rajkot, a few television crews revisited Mishra and asked him
if he was worried. “I told them, I did not make a Modi temple. There is a Modi
idol and he is praying to Lord Shiva as a devotee,” he says. It was a
suggestion by Shiva himself, who appeared in a dream of his, he adds.
 |
| The priest Brijendranath Mishra reciting a poem dedicated to Narendra Modi to an uninterested acquaintance |
Towards the evening,
Mishra calls upon some local VHP and BJP leaders to join him for prayers.
Around six of us crowd into the temple’s sanctum sanctorum, and sit in a circle
around the Shivling. I notice that the Modi idol, unlike the original
incarnation, has been colour corrected to look more peachy, less wheatish.
Decked in garlands of beads and plastic flowers, the idol wears a saffron
waistcoat, a red cap and spectacles devoid of lenses.
Mishra bends on his
haunches and lights a flame to begin his prayers to Lord Shiva. He leads from
the front, blowing a conch and ringing a brass bell at suitable intervals. Five
minutes into the Shiv aarti, the gathering arises and
wraps it up with a resounding ‘Har Har Mahadev!’
And then it begins: a
rendition of Modi Chalisa, written and composed by Mishra himself. ‘Tere naam ka poore desh mein danka hai baaja,
Om Jai Modi Raja (Hail Modi, the ruler, he whose name has resounded across
the country)’ echo the voices within the chamber. They clap and hail the Lord
and His disciple.
The elevation of this
god to the berth at the Centre has done little to change the quality of life in
Bhagwanpur. The village still reels under 12-hour power cuts as it has been for
years. There are barely any trace of tarmac on the local roads.
Every morning before
Mishra begins his prayers, his sister-in-law who stays the next door enters the
temple and places a diya before the
idol. I ask her if there are any wishes she prays to Modi for fulfilment.
“Just that, may the
nation prosper, may we get better and proper schools, hospitals, may our houses
be in a better shape...”
Have any of those been
realised?
“Not yet,” she says,
“But we are still hopeful.”
Mishra isn’t too
concerned about local infrastructure. His only aspiration is that the Prime
Minister graces his temple and participates in a havan.
Until then, he says, the rituals will continue.
The next day, a few
hours before I leave for Allahabad, I stumble upon Dwivedi again. This time, he
tells me why he thinks the priest does not like him.
“When they set up the
Modi temple, I told them, ‘You can’t make gods out of humans. If you had set up
the idols of your parents instead, it would have been a much tasteful affair’,”
Dwivedi says. “After that day, I fell out of their favour.”
The Hindu
temple of a Christian Goddess
Karimnagar, Telengana
 |
| Fifty year old maid Gauramma at the Sonia temple, the cleanliness of which assures a livelihood- reason why she regards the Congress president as a goddess |
For over a year now,
Gauramma has been taking the same route from her house to the centre of Mallial
village with a cleaning cloth and bucket of water. Around 9 am, she borrows the
keys from a local shopkeeper and opens the wooden doors that reveal a marble
idol of Sonia Gandhi, with high cheekbones and a double chin. After wiping the
dust off the bust, it is the turn of the halo-shaped painting of Rajiv Gandhi
that adorns the background.
Gauramma is born and
raised in the village located 35 km away from Karimnagar, now in Telengana. She
doesn’t know of the movement for statehood or Sonia Gandhi’s role in the
formation of the new state. It’s only when I explain it to her, she says, that
she understands why the temple is there. It’s something else, however, that
makes her revere the Congress leader as a goddess.
“It is because of her
that I get a regular wage,” she says. A hundred rupees every month.
It takes more than a day
to reach Karimnagar from Allahabad. Outside the train windows, the landscape
changes from vast stretches of fields to unkempt forests once you cross
Chattisgarh. After a nightcap in the city, I board a bus Mallial, where at noon
I met the local Congress mandal chief
Rajeshwar Reddy met me at a tea stall a few feet away from the Sonia Gandhi
temple.
By the second half of
2013, the Congress Working Committee, under Gandhi's leadership, had decided
that Telangana—then a part of Andhra Pradesh—would be granted statehood. Once
the news spread, party workers in Karimnagar decided to build her a temple in
gratitude. With the local body ruled by a Congress sarpanch,
Reddy’s wife, it was a mere matter of time before government land was
sanctioned for its construction. A custom-made marble bust that cost Rs 2.5 lakh
was brought in from Rajasthan, and on 2 June 2014, the formation day of
Telangana, the temple was thrown open to the public. Ponnam Prabhakar, the district’s Member of Parliament, also announced a plan of
building such temples in every assembly segment.
 |
| The Sonia Gandhi temple (extreme right) at Mallial village in Karimnagar district |
On my visit to the
temple, I notice that except for the paintings of Rahul Gandhi and Indira
Gandhi on the side walls, there’s little else in the enclosure. Reddy assures
me that for Telangana’s people, Sonia Gandhi is akin to a goddess—only, not one
you pray to. There is no priest at the temple, and while the doors are kept
open for a couple of hours every evening, no rituals are performed.
“Nobody can do an aarti to a lively human. That is not correct,” Reddy told me. I ask
him if it will be okay after her demise.
“Then it will be
compulsory. A must,” he said.
Next, I meet Suresh
Dumma, the artist who painted the portrait of Rahul Gandhi on one of the walls,
at his shop right opposite the temple. “There is nothing temple-like about it,”
he says. “The only people who come here are the local Congressmen.”
That evening, while
talking to Prabhakar at his office in Karimnagar, I bring up the criticism I
had heard. “It is our way of thanking her. We are not cheating anyone. Whenever
we pass the village, we salute her and then go ahead,” he says.
Yet, I want to know if
the temple has been put up in gratitude for Telangana, what explains the other
Gandhi family members inside? What do they think Rahul Gandhi’s role was in the
attainment of statehood?
“If Rahul Gandhi wasn’t in the loop, only
Sonia Gandhi [alone] would not have taken the decision,” says Prabhakar. “He is
our young leader.”
And Indira Gandhi?
“She is our Congress
leader, she was our PM...”
“That makes it seem like
a monument for the Congress. “
After evading a direct
answer for some more time, Prabhakar finally says in exasperation, “We made the
temple out of our own accord. We have the right to make a portrait of Rahul
Gandhi. It doesn’t matter if people come to the temple or not... Yes, it has a
photo of Nehru, of Rahul Gandhi of Indira Gandhi. And they will stay.”
A
Shrine for the Mahatma
Sambalpur, Orissa
 |
| Kaliya Bag, the head priest of the Gandhi temple, a member of the Harijan community, standing outside of the temple on the day I visited. Local customs had made him "untouchable" for a day |
Our bodies are the real temples rather than buildings
of stone. The best place for congregational worship is in the open with the sky
as the canopy and mother earth below for the floor.
- The Mind of the Mahatma: Encyclopaedia of Gandhi’s Thoughts
When he wrote those
lines, it had been years since Gandhi had visited a temple. He did not have
anything against idolatry or places of religious worship, though, so long as it
steered clear of superstition.
I have no way of knowing
if these words escaped Abhimanyu Kumar in 1971, the year he became an MLA from
Sambalpur district in Orissa and started work on deifying the Father of the
Nation. Now 91 years old, Kumar is too weak to hear, speak or confirm as much.
The temple he had built is a structure of stone, with its portico, shikhar and padlocked doors separating the deity from the
masses. Responsibility for it has been passed over to his son Pramod Ranjan
Kumar, a farmer and businessman.
At a distance of 10 km
from the city, the Gandhi temple is located in Harijanpada, an all-Dalit colony
that’s home to about 250 families. The former MLA was born here and was witness
to numerous atrocities committed by ‘upper castes’. Back in those days, Dalits
were banned from entering temples in several parts of India. In 1943, when
Kumar was still in his teens, Gandhi held a general meeting at Sambalpur.
According to Pramod, his father had attended it and was immensely inspired. It
was then that he decided to build an all-caste, all-religion temple dedicated
to Gandhi.
“Once the temple was
completed in 1974, he appointed a priest from the Harijan community to conduct
the rituals,” says Pramod Kumar. At the insistence of his elders, Kaliya Bag, a
peon at a local women’s college, took up the responsibility. He had no prior
experience in conducting rituals and so he got himself a how-to book on Hindu
worship and taught himself how to be a priest. Four decades since his self-education,
the 79-year-old still performs his duties.
 |
| Perhaps as a tribute to the Mahatma, those who keep him company in the inner sanctum transcend the barriers of caste, language and ideology |
Perhaps as a fitting
tribute to the Mahatma, the people who keep him company in the inner sanctum
transcend the barriers of caste, language and ideology. Next to the brass
statue of the Mahatma, there hangs a portrait of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, Subhash
Chandra Bose, Swami Vivekananda, even Indira Gandhi. At the feet of the
Mahatma’s statue, there is the usual paraphernalia of flowers, kalash,
bell and a copy of the Bhagwad Gita.
A soft-spoken Kumar solemnly
nods when I tell him about my pilgrimage. Without offering any comments on the
other temples, he says that he doesn’t see the Mahatma temple as an exception
to the conventional idea of worship.
“See, like there is Lord
Krishna or Rama… nobody has seen them. We make temples in their name based on
the Shastras and their lore. After a hundred years, there won’t be anyone left
who has seen Gandhi. He, too, will then be considered a god,” he says.
That evening, Bag does
not conduct the rituals. Taking his place is a dhoti-clad man in his
mid-thirties. He seems inexperienced, and frequently turns to look at Bag for
approval, who stands on the front steps of the temple, guiding him on how to go
about it. Throughout the hour, which also features a reading from the Bhagwad
Gita, Bag continues to man the entrance, his hands folded in reverence. Then it
is time for the recital of Raghupati
Raghav Raja Ram, the hallmark of Gandhi’s prayer meetings.
As I watch Bag recite
the bhajan under his breath, his voice drowned out by the enthusiastic
children in the portico, I recall a conversation Kumar was having with a local
earlier, informing him of the arrival of a newborn in Bag’s household.
“...so he won’t be
coming to the temple today,” Kumar had said.
“Why?” I had asked.
It was time for a lesson
in cultural intelligence: whenever a child is born in the family, restrictions
are placed on all members of the family. Until the umbilical stump falls off,
one cannot—among other things—visit a temple. In the words of Kumar: “For now,
he has become an untouchable.”
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