The first two weeks of the last month of 2024 have been quite busy for Mamata Banerjee.
From being featured as the new acceptable face of the opposition INDI alliance trumping Congress leader Rahul Gandhi to seeking deployment of a United Nations peacekeeping mission in Bangladesh, from tom-tomming a death sentence awarded by a POCSO court in a case of rape and murder of a minor girl and congratulating the state police for completing the investigation briskly in the backdrop of an alleged slow pace investigation being conducted by the CBI into the RG Kar rape and murder case to reacting to Bangladesh politicians’ claims on Bengal, Bihar, Odisha with a lollipop, the Bengal Chief Minister’s hands were literally full.
But, amid all these things, she also did one more thing. On a sunny Wednesday afternoon of December 11, Mamata briskly walked up the massive portico of a structure, which her government wants to call Jagannath Dham Sanskriti Kendra or Jagannath Temple Cultural Centre in the seaside resort of Digha in Purba Medinipur district; around 180 kms from Kolkata, and announced that the project will be open for public on April 30 next year. Incidentally, the date coincides with Akshaya Tritiya, an auspicious day according to the Hindu almanac.
Now, why suddenly a temple complex, which in most ways is a replica of the famous Jagannath Temple of Puri in Odisha? Why is the Bengal government’s West Bengal Housing Infrastructure Development Corporation Limited, HIDCO in short, engaged in building a temple complex worth around Rs 200 crore? And why is Mamata pushing hard for an inauguration in April next year?
Questions like these and more are bound to come knocking the doors of Mamata’s Trinamool Congress. More so, because temples are not new to a state like West Bengal as are mosques, churches, synagogues, gurdwaras or other such places of worship. It is now more or less established that till now the people of Bengal by and large have rejected the party, which has over the years built its support base on the narrative of aggressive temple politics. It is true that the BJP has unseated the Left Front as well as the Congress from the opposition space of Bengal, but could not up its Lok Sabha tally since 2019. In a never before performance, BJP had secured a whopping 18 out of 42 Lok Sabha seats from Bengal in the 2019 polls. In the general elections concluded earlier this year, that figure has slipped to 12.
So, why is Mamata suddenly training all her energy towards a temple a little over a year to the state Assembly elections of 2026, knowing well that her core vote base is yet to gel with temple politics? The only plausible explanation is, she is a bit jittery with the vote percentage of the saffron party. Not going by the number of seats, a glance at the vote share of BJP in Bengal shows, the party had got around 40.6 per cent votes in the 2019 polls, which translated to 18 LS seats. This time, the saffron share is at 38.73 per cent with 12 LS seats. The Trinamool Congress supremo knows a 4 to 5 percent positive shift of vote share in the favour of BJP could eventually put pressure on the ruling party in the coming Assembly elections. Hence, this sudden rush for a temple.
Mamata knows well that the continuous success mantra of the Trinamool Congress in Bengal is necessarily wrapped in two folders - one, the absence of a political alternative and two, the minority Muslim voters of Bengal have been reposing their faith in her out of their urge to keep the BJP at bay in one hand and not finding any political dividend in the Left on the other. But, she also knows that this support base has nearly reached a saturation point and she has to win over more minds. She has seen how a battered BJP, which has faced a Trinamool white wash in all Assembly bypolls since the general elections and was literally shown the door by the agitating doctors and civil society agitations since the RG Kar rape and murder incident, cling on to the issue of attacks and persecution of minorities in Bangladesh. Mamata knows the sentiments are high this time and she might as well lose a sizable chunk from the cocktail of majority Hindu and namasudra Matua votes, when she sends her candidates to seek mandate in the 2026 Assembly elections. The Didi of Bengal is known to be sometimes impulsive, but not politically imprudent or reckless.
So, Mamata Banerjee has literally taken cue from Narendra Modi. Just as she had imported cut-out campaigns from the southern states of the country to Bengal in successive elections, she has successfully brought temple politics into the political discourse of the state. Modi had inaugurated an under-construction Ram Mandir in Ayodhya just ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. Mamata has announced the inauguration of her version of Jagannath Temple ahead of the state Assembly elections.
Modi had Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath and RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat to accompany him as he stepped inside the sanctum-sanctorum of the Ram Mandir for the first time on a crisp morning of January 22, earlier this year. Twelve months later when Mamata faced journalists with the Digha Jagannath Temple replica on her background, she had ISKCON Kolkata vice-president Radharamn Das among others, by her side.
Charting out her plans for the temple complex, Mamata not only announced a donation of Rs 5 lakh from her personal account for a ceremonial golden broom akin to the golden broom which the King of Puri uses to sweep the road before the chariots of deities are drawn before the annual Rath Yatra, she made Radharamn as one of members of the trustee board of the yet to be inaugurated Digha temple. Radharamn is the same person who has been quite vocal about the arrest of minority Hindu leader Chinmay Krishnadas in Bangladesh and has been continuously highlighting incidents of persecution across the border.
Mamata’s deft move with the Jagannath Temple and Radharamn Das, has already choked the saffron voice in Bengal to a good extent. Suvendu Adhikari, the Leader of Opposition in the Assembly and Mamata’s current bete-noire in the state has said, he ‘felt bad’ to see Radharamn Das standing there. Adhikari knows the danger is clear and present and the rug is yet again pulled from under the BJP by Mamata Banerjee by snatching away all that was left with the saffron brigade to get some mileage from Bangladesh. When Suvendu said, “She is building the temple as she knows that the Hindus here are uniting and won’t vote for her in the 2026 Assembly elections,” it sounded more of frustration.
It is hard to find if Mamata Banerjee has read the Bard where he wrote, ‘It is not in the stars to hold our destiny, but in ourselves,’ but she surely is taking the divine route to zip up any fissures in the majority vote bank. And in the process, Bengal’s 2026 Assembly elections could be played out more on the temple plank than focusing on the state government’s performance for five years, the allegations of nepotism and corruption within the ruling Trinamool Congress or the state’s law and order situation laid threadbare after the RG Kar rape and murder.
