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At a time when the BJP's stars are at the top on the eve of the Lok Sabha polls, the Puri-Joshimath Sankaracharyas may have kick-started a row whose efforts might be to divide Hindus, not in the name of castes, but on what passes for greater belief, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
The decision by the Sankaracharyas of Puri in Odisha and Joshimath in Uttarkhand not to participate in the Ayodhya consecration on January 22 has struck a discordant note in an otherwise smooth end to the decades-old issue.
A few other mutt-heads and Hindu seers have shared their reservations to performing the consecration before the completion of the civil works and Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi's presence in the temple's sanctum during the consecration.
Against this, the Sankaracharyas of Sringeri (Karnataka) and Dwaraka (Gujarat) have no issues with the consecration, but the public statements in their name do not mention if either of them would participate.
The Kanchi Sankaracharya has gone on to say that there was nothing wrong in the leader of 1.3 billion people presiding over the consecration. The Kanchi seer, who possibly received the invite late, is reportedly planning to be present for the consecration.
Incidentally, followers of the Kanchi mutt point to two facts. One, the previous Kanchi seer, Sri Jayendra Saraswati, had lent his hand in finding an amicable solution to the vexed issue though it happened only through a Supreme Court verdict.
They also see it as an affront to the mutt and the Sankaracharya when the organisers have invited Durga Stalin, the believer wife of Tamil Nadu's atheist Chief Minister M K Stalin, and mother of Minister Udhayanidhi, who kicked up the Sanatana Dharma row, which uncharacteristically reverberated across the country not very long ago.
Independent of Modi's presence, which, of course is a central theme in every which way, there is substance in the Puri-Joshimath Sankaracharyas' criticism that the consecration has been 'politicised'.
A few other seers in the north, including those in Ayodhya, have pointed out how the famous Somnath temple consecration took place, post-Independence, before the completion of civil works, and how the auspicious kalash and dhwaja, or flag, were installed full 14 years after the main function.
Both religious heads and media-persons have pointed to the presence of then President Rajendra Prasad at the consecration ceremony, that too defying then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru's view that the titular Head of the 'secular' Indian State should not be seen in what to him was a partisan religious event of the majority.
Another parallel is being created by pointing to the then home minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel being the chief organiser of the Somnath consecration -- the reasons are obvious.
On this question, critics point out how Rajendra Prasad was not present inside the sanctum at Somnath and how the phrase 'secular' came to be inserted into the Preamble of the Constitution, much later, during the Emergency.
To the BJP critics, it was an 'interpolation', but something which none since in power has sought to remove from the Preamble.
If that were not enough, some have gone to the extent of telling the non-conforming Sankaracharyas, who are Saiviite seers, that Ayodhya is an all-Vaishnavite affair, particularly concerning the sect.
So, it's not even caste but a larger sect-divide though its social, political and electoral impact is not easy to fathom just now.
For referring to the Sankaracharyas as having no role in the matter, the social media question is, 'Why then invite them to the consecration in the first place?' The accompanying social media query is why then those not belonging to the Ramanandhi Sampradaya are given or getting the pride of place in the consecration ceremonies and in the front rows, too, marginalising the mainline sect to the point of ignoring them completely.
Some of the current confusion may have owed to multiple faces that the organisers exude.
That is only after the domineering face and backdrop of Modi, the man, as much as Modi, the prime minister.
It all began with a temple committee issuing consecration-related statements and invitations, but now the RSS parent of the ruling BJP and allied outfit seem to be in charge.
There is this major gaffe -- deliberate, it would seem -- of the committee deciding not even to invite L K Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi, the two original temple crusaders, citing their age and health, but the VHP has since invited at least the former and also declared that they would ensure his participation.
It is ironic that the th epresence of Advani, whose daring Ayodhya rath yatra in 1990 alone has culminated now in the consecration, has become the subject matter of a national debate.
It is even more ironical that at this advanced age -- Advani, 96, Joshi, 90 -- the two are still among the respondent-accused in the 'Ayodhya demolition case' before the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad high court.
The last time there was a report of the case being posted for hearing after a long break, the national media had predicted the desirability and possibility of the ruling BJP-NDA fielding Advani for the Presidency.
Possibly owing to the purported embarrassment attaching to the sudden reopening of the case, the ruling party thought it wiser and named incumbent Droupadi Murmu for the post.
It was the second time in less than a decade that Advani had the national limelight -- after the party favoured Modi as the prime ministerial nominee in 2014.
When the debate was on if the Kanchi Sankaracharya, Advani and Joshi should be invited for the consecration, a new organisation, the World Hindu Congress Foundation, declared that 100 diplomats and MPs from 55 countries will be among the 10,000-long list of special invitees from across the world.
Is it then a government-organised national day, where such diplomatic protocol exists?
The list of invitees also includes Bollywood celebrities, sports stars, industrialists and, of course, politicians, together making for a grand gala opening akin to that of an Asiad or the Olympics.
In all such events, the presence of celebrities has invariably added pomp and colour to the proceedings.
But this one is purely a religious event, where piety and religiosity alone should govern, even granting the Kanchi seer's argument about the PM's domineering presence.
Does it mean that the consecration has become yet another media event in contemporary India, a photo/selfie opportunity to be posted on social media?
The nineties kids and those born after them possibly do not know enough about Advani's rath yatra or the Mandal-Mandir row that kick-started it -- or, that is the majority version.
The Mandal issue was a sudden discovery for the Janata Dal prime minister, the late V P Singh, when Advani, leading the 85-strong BJP outside underwriter of the government in Parliament, revived the Ayodhya issue without giving the new prime minister time to settle down.
Or, that was his strategy, it would seem.
It was then that Singh dusted up the forgotten Mandal Commission Report on Backward Class reservations, commissioned by the Janata Party regime of then prime minister Morarji Desai in 1978.
The rath yatra followed and the media-hyped Mandal-Mandir row was all over the place.
Even at the time, a nation-wide opinion poll indicated that the people were more worried about costs and prices, jobs and incomes. Mandal and/or Mandir were way below in their list of priorities.
At the end of the day, the Mandal-Mandir dispute was not about beliefs and social justice or belief against social justice.
They provided the prop for what was Advani's bid to split the voters, especially in the Hindi/Hindu heartland, on religious lines, and Singh seeking to outsmart him by seeking to divide that divide by introducing the caste element, post haste.
Singh's calculations proved right but he was not the winner, maybe also because he did not have the RSS kind of well-orchestrated and even better-oiled delivery mechanism.
The Congress Opposition gained in the post-yatra Lok Sabha polls of 1991, where the intervening Rajiv Gandhi assassination too added unexpected/unanticipated heft.
V P Singh was proved even better in the post-demolition (1993) assembly polls in Uttar Pradesh, where Ayodhya is located.
In the November 1993 elections, the caste-based combo of Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party defeated the religion-centric BJP.
Later, when the BJP-BSP combine defeated the SP, it was the social alliance of the upper castes and Dalits that trounced the intermediary castes, going by the BC/MBC/OBC tag under Mandal reservations.
It was the traditional post-Independence social combo that the Congress rival represented as a whole in the post-Independence era.
The Lohia Socialites in the Hindu-dominated cow-belt in the North represented the intermediary castes. It was the DMK in southern Tamil Nadu.
There were identifiable political parties on these lines with local idioms in many other states.
In the end, the BJP had only hijacked the traditional Congress strategy under a more appealing religion agenda.
That too after other caste forces like the BSP's Kanshi Ram-Mayawati duo had made a dent in UP and Ram Vilas Paswan in Bihar, the latter only after Jagjivan Ram had weakened the monolith Congress by walking out of the party and the Indira Gandhi government on the very eve of post-emergency elections of 1977.
Today, at a time when the BJP's stars are still at the top on the eve of the Lok Sabha polls, and more so Modi's charisma, the party's real staying power just now, the Puri-Joshimath Sankaracharyas might have kick-started a row whose efforts might be to divide the majority Hindus, not in the name of castes but on what passes for greater belief.
If nothing else, the Congress, which was looking for a 'convincing' (?) reason to what tantamount to a political boycott of the consecration on election-eve for very many reasons, has clung to the Puri-Joshimath seers' pronouncements.
It is another matter that the invitations for Sonia Gandhi, Mallikarjun Kharge and Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, the Lok Sabha party leader, too were political, and the issue politicised.
As expected of the BJP, the party, facing the wrath, if any, of two Sankaracharyas, criticised the Congress rival (alone?) for politicising what to them otherwise was religion and only religion.
Even granting that the Sankaracharyas' criticism and boycott might have kicked off a silent re-thinking in some, if not many of the non-traditional BJP backers and Modi bhakts, do they want to return to the middle-path and become the decisive fence-sitters or 'swing voters' all over again after two successive commitments to the party and the leader in 2014 and 2019, is the question.
The question of some of them wanting to return to the Opposition fold, where they traditionally belonged, is also there.
But the larger question is: One, do these re-thinking sections have anything extraordinarily against the BJP-Modi combo, or anything going in favour of the Opposition INDIA combine, to cross over or even take the middle-path?
This is even more so about the so-called disillusioned sections of the old-world Sangh Parivar, whose ideological mould and mentoring do not permit personality worship -- something that some of them had frowned upon when Advani was being defied at the height of the rath yatra.
It is a choice that they cannot afford to even consider, leave alone exercise, as it could well mean the return of what to them is the 'pseudo-secular' Opposition with the Nehru-Gandhian Congress as the centre-piece, not even to the centre-stage but inwards from the politico-electoral margins.
But there are others in the grouping outside of the committed cadres, or neo-converts, who had readily identified with Sonia Gandhi's 'Aam Aadmi' call in 2004, when the Vajpayee-Advani duo moved away from hardline Hindutva to 'India Shining!', pitching their pace on the performance of the BJP-NDA government for six long years.
That is a debate that MoSha's BJP is unwilling to risk. Every time the PM talks of poverty-alleviation through nation-wide programmes that are a straight lift from southern Tamil Nadu's Dravidian 'social welfare' schemes of the past 100 years and more, he and his party keep returning to their Hindutva parent, like an unsure infant keeps toddling back to the mom's embrace.
Yet, the Dravidian welfare schemes are economy-destroying freebies in the eyes of the BJP's centre-right economists but a life-saver for millions of people when it carries the Modi brand and image!
N Sathiya Moorthy, veteran journalist and author, is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator.
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com