How Modi’s Ram Temple changes post-Partition consensus on secularism

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘dandwat pranam’ before the idol of Ram Lalla (the child Ram) in Ayodhya’s new Ram temple has inaugurated a new age in the history of the Indian Republic

His forehead adorned with the red and white mark of Vishnu – vermillion encased in sandalwood paste – and resplendent in gold kurta with white angavastram, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘dandwat pranam’ before the idol of Balak Ram (the child Ram) in Ayodhya’s new Ram temple has inaugurated a new age in the history of the Indian Republic. Symbolising total surrender before God in the Hindu tradition, Modi’s symbolic gesture in Ayodhya — redolent of his shashtang pranam on the steps of Parliament when he entered it for the first time in 2014 — is a visual marker of the end of the Nehruvian post-Partition consensus on secularism that had marked the first few decades of independent India.

The new BJP, under Narendra Modi, had long won the cultural war on Ram. Now, Prime Minister Modi, personally leading the pran pratishtha of Ram in what he called a “divine programme” in Ayodhya, has visually inaugurated the new cultural consensus on Hinduism in India. As he put in his public address from Ayodhya: “After centuries, Ram has returned home… It is the beginning of a “New Age.”

Modi’s political vocabulary in Ayodhya — with the who’s of who of India in physical attendance — is part of a concerted strategy that combines religiosity, cultural identity and Hinduness with a new unapologetic cultural nationalism that is deeply rooted in Hindu cultural symbols.

Make no mistake: this cultural play reaches out to many Hindus beyond the BJP’s core group of Hindutva supporters. The Ayodhya movement may have begun as one that was focused on religion, but Modi’s political ingenuity lies in successfully repositioning the endgame of the Ram temple movement as a civilisational — as opposed to a religious — catalyst for the rejuvenation of a New India.

With cinema halls around the country playing the ceremony live — with popcorn; with neighbourhoods nationwide celebrating the event like a new Diwali, and with Ram Temple flags being sold on traffic lights with the national flag before the Republic Day, what was once the fringe is now at the centre of the mainstream of popular culture. Modi has touched upon something deeper here than mere religiosity.

Many liberals make the mistake of dismissing the carefully choreographed symbolism of Modi presiding over the refurbishment of ancient religious sites — such as the Kashi Vishwanath temple in Varanasi earlier — as mere political optics aimed at short-term electoral mobilisation. Others, like the political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta, have argued that this marks “the moment where Hinduism ceases to be religious.” They could not be more wrong.

The cultural powerplay of this moment and its political economy is deeply intertwined with the idea of Modi’s ‘New India’ itself and heralds a radical break with the Nehruvian past. There are five key features that characterise this shift:

How Narendra Modi Inverts Jawaharlal Nehru: Modi’s fronting of the Ram temple can be directly contrasted with Nehru’s firm opposition to the state playing any role in reconstructing the Somnath temple in 1951. His intense debates with K.M. Munshi, the minister in his cabinet who spearheaded that initiative, and his insistence that Rajendra Prasad, India’s first president, attend the Somnath ceremony in his personal capacity, not as the Republic’s first citizen, set a template for a newly independent country that had just been partitioned on religious lines.

Importantly, Nehru’s opposition to the government rebuilding temples — as opposed to his famous positioning of dams as the “temples of modern India” — was framed in a state that, at least constitutionally, was not yet ‘secular’. The words’ secular’ and ‘socialist’ were added to the Preamble by Indira Gandhi in 1976 during the Emergency through the Forty-second Constitutional Amendment.

Modi’s personal fronting of temple projects overall — not just the one in Ayodhya - stands out in sharp contrast.

Nehru eschewed Hinduness in the political theatre of India. He fought independent India’s first general election explicitly on this issue — pitting himself against the Jan Sangh, the Hindu Mahasabha and the wider Hindu Right. This meant that even though the Congress’s cadres and leadership at the district and state levels remained deeply religious, its leadership at the top followed a different public culture for years.

Modi, on the other hand, emphatically asserted in Ayodhya about “Ram se Rashtra” (the nation is from Ram) and that the temple ended “centuries of slavery.”

As the PM has said earlier, “Be it Vishwanath Dham in Kashi or Kedar Baba’s Dham, today India’s spiritual and cultural glory is being restored. Today, New India, along with its modern aspirations, continues with its ancient heritage and identity with the same zeal and enthusiasm, and every Indian is proud of it. These spiritual places are becoming mediums of new possibilities along with our faith.”

This idea of the rejuvenation of an older civilisational idea of India — that was essentially Hindu — is a powerful one. With an evocative harking back to ancient greatness, this idea of Bharat has resonance among many more than just the stormtroopers of Hindutva.

Temple Towns and Domestic Tourism: Beyond symbolism and the reordering of ritual economies and cultures, this carries within it a much deeper remaking of the political economy as well, with an underlying economic design focused on a new kind of Indian consumer and citizen — especially the domestic tourist.

Under Modi, the focus on temples has been wide-ranging — with a deep focus on infrastructure, development and domestic tourism as much as it is on cultural nationalism. A sampling of the PM’s focus on large-scale projects on religious sites is revealing. (see Table 1)

The political strategy of using religious spectacles is also underpinned by the economic logic of religious tourism. Agra’s Taj Mahal has long been the global face of Indian tourism. However, UP government officials have asserted that while Agra consistently gets the highest number of foreign tourist arrivals in the state each year (over 2 million foreigners and 83.5 million Indians in 2019), the religious sites of Prayagraj (289.1 million because of the Kumbh that year, Ayodhya (over 30 million), Govardhan (16.9 million) and Vrindavan (16 million) consistently receive a substantially higher number of travellers, mostly domestic pilgrims.

Brokerage Jefferies estimates that the Ram temple is expected to eventually draw over 50 million visitors a year. The UP government estimates that Ayodhya is likely to receive about 20 million visitors over the next six months – or about 100,00 a day. The SBI, in a report, has estimated that domestic tourist spending in UP will hit over Rs 4 lakh crore this year, almost double the Rs 2.2 lakh crore they spent last year. The construction of the Ram temple is estimated to contribute a major chunk of this increase.

Connecting Temples: Creating new transport linkages is a vital cog of this strategy beyond the redevelopment of the sights themselves. Tourism numbers also underlay the Central government’s plans (currently under discussion) to eventually connect Delhi and Ayodhya via a high-speed bullet train (to run on high-speed rail corridors). Also on the anvil is connectivity for the religious sites of Mathura and Prayagraj, as well as Agra, on the proposed Delhi–Varanasi bullet train route.

At a national level, the 15 thematic circuits being developed as part of a New Swadesh Darshan Scheme include a Ramayana Circuit and a Buddhist Circuit. For example, IRCTC has launched the Sri Ramayana Express, a special tourist train, which serves only vegetarian meals, that takes pilgrims to places associated with the Ramayana in 18 days.

At the state level, in UP, for example, Yogi Adityanath, in his maiden state budget as chief minister during his first tenure, pushed to allocate Rs 1,240 crore towards developing the Ram, Krishna and Buddha tourism circuits in the state. In 2019–2020, his government allocated significant funds to this project — over Rs 300 crore to Ayodhya, over Rs 125 crore to UP Brij Tirtha (tourism for the Mathura–Vrindavan circuit) and over Rs 200 crore for roads leading up to the Kashi Vishwanath temple in Varanasi.

Conceptually, these projects merge seamlessly with the state government’s declared aim of rebuilding Ayodhya as a ‘Vaishwik Nagri’ (global city), and with the new airport that would have flights to South Korea, Fiji, Japan, Nepal and Thailand.

The Idea of a Hindu Civilisation and Soft Power: Where China uses Mandarin and a host of cultural tools for its soft power projection, the BJP seeks to deploy the cultural power of Hinduism for India’s global branding. A good example of this is the Modi regime’s celebration of yoga, which is personally fronted by the prime minister, both nationally and internationally. It is not an accident that the BJP has made much of the establishment of International Yoga Day by the UN,  soon after Modi came to power in 2014.  The UN Resolution was proposed by PM Modi himself in an address during the opening of the 69th session of the General Assembly. ‘Yoga is an invaluable gift from our ancient tradition,’ he told the UN.

The idea of Hindu cultural power is an incipient concept still, but what these statements indicate is a visualisation of India powered by Hinduness and unapologetically. For the purveyors of ‘New India’ — a slogan formally adopted by the BJP in a political resolution on 9 September 2018 — such a country would overwhelmingly look to its Hindu traditions as markers of identity.

This is essentially a positioning of India as the fount of a Hindu civilisation as compared to, say, a Sinic/Chinese or Western civilisation. It is rooted in the civilisational notion of India as a Hindu power that is steeped in ‘parampara’, or tradition. This is an India wielding the soft power of ancient Hindu practices, acting as a swing state—probably in the sense that Samuel Huntington meant it when he wrote The Clash of Civilizations. Huntington’s thesis, first fleshed out as an article in 1993, basically argued that the praxis of local politics would shift to the ‘politics of ethnicity’, while that of global politics would shift to the ‘politics of civilizations’.

In other words, ‘cultural entities’ would become the central dividing axes of power, locally and internationally: Sinic (Chinese), Islamic, Japanese, Orthodox (Russia), Western (Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand), Latin American, African and Hindu (India).

You do not have to agree with this formulation to see its ambition.

Architectural Reordering, ‘New India’ and Legacy: Ayodhya, other temple projects, the reordering of the ritual economy and the explicit focus on cultural markers in this shift segue seamlessly into PM Modi’s other signature projects that reorder the visual geography of the nation. The new Central Vista and the move to the new Parliament building in Delhi are all physical manifestations of the larger reordering of the nation that PM Modi heralds with his idea of ‘New India’.

This shift in India’s visual geography, in that sense, is long-term, systemic and intrinsically linked to an alternative conceptual idea of the nation that is fundamentally different from Nehru’s.

Thirty-four years after the BJP adopted the Palampur Resolution which made a Ram temple in Ayodhya a key political aim for the party, Modi has finally delivered it. The idea of Ram Rajya, however, is as much economic as it is cultural. It is to that challenge that we must move now.