India: Hindu preachers, the Shankaracharyas of Puri and Dwarka furious with BJP’s Narendra Modi

The Times of India, May 2, 2014

Shankaracharyas vs Modi

Jyoti Malhotra in IST | India

Two of the holiest Hindu preachers, the Shankaracharyas of Puri and Dwarka, are so furious with BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi that they have vowed to travel to Varanasi before the constituency votes on May 12 and “expose” him.

Puri Shankaracharya Swami Adhokshjanand Devtirath publicly blamed Modi for letting the Gujarat riots take place under his watch, while the Dwarka Shankaracharya Swami Swaroopanand Saraswati has been especially upset since Modi’s supporters replaced the traditional celebration of Shiva in Varanasi with a slogan for Modi, according to PTI.

These amazing comments by the two holy men come on the eve of the last two phases of the Lok Sabha polls, in which Modi himself is contesting from Varanasi, which he is expected to win hands down. BJP supporters and strategists from the rest of Uttar Pradesh are already making their way to the city, so as to help galvanise the entire Poorvanchal region into voting for Modi and seating him on the throne of Delhi with a huge victory margin.

And instead of “Har, har Mahadev,” a commonly heard cry in Varanasi, the city of the ancient and much-beloved Kashi Vishwanath temple that is the nerve centre of what is widely acknowledged to be the oldest living city in the world – BJP’s supporters had transformed the greeting into “Har, har Modi” and “Ghar, ghar Modi!”

The Shankaracharyas’ comments may or may not make a difference to the voter in Varanasi at this stage, but the fact that two of them have actually spoken up, certainly casts a long shadow on aggressive nationalism of “Hindutva” being promoted by the RSS, the BJP and especially Modi, these past many years.

In fact, the choice of Varanasi as Modi’s second constituency – which is more than likely to become his first, if he wins from here, and willingly abandon Vadodara – is not accidental. Modi has wanted to make the point that Hinduism’s holiest city has chosen him to represent it in the country’s highest political temple, in Parliament.

By its constant hammering home of the hardline politics of ‘Hindutva’ and erasing the softer, mellifluous lines of Hinduism, over the decades and especially since the run up to the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the RSS-BJP combine has tried to change the very character of what is essentially a unique but contradictory philosophy in which everything is true – as well as its opposite.

In Hinduism exists the concepts of ‘shakti’ and the female goddess intimately tied to the celebratory prowess and display of strength of the male god, as well as the union of the two, a half man-half woman deity, the ‘ardhanarishwar.’ The concepts of ‘atma’ and ‘anaatma,’ or as Jean-Paul Sartre wilfully put it much later, Being and Nothingness. The rites and rituals of worship that the Brahmin insists are the essential elements of prayer by every believing Hindu – as well as the rejection of each of those rituals by believers who believe they are God themselves.

Over the years, as the RSS and the BJP grew from strength to strength and holy men around the land seemed entranced by Narendra Modi’s latter-day incarnation of decisiveness and strength, few have dared to step up and publicly announce that the Modi school of thought is, perhaps, one way of looking at India – but hardly one that is inclusive, especially in the face of India’s incredible diversity, and certainly not the only one.

Now we have two Shankaracharyas pointing out that Modi is not really the answer — not to Hinduism and not even to India.

Those who divided the people in order to come to power, said the Dwarka Shankaracharya, should be exposed.

However, his aides said the Shankaracharya himself would not campaign against Modi, because of his increasing age, but would send his close aide, Swami Avi Mukteshwaranand, on his behalf, to Varanasi.

The Dwarka Shankaracharya has been furious that a mere mortal is aspiring to share the pedestal with God. So he protested to the RSS, the motherlode of the BJP, telling them that if they and/or the BJP wanted to worship a “man,” then it was certain that “God would stop Modi” in his tracks.

Certainly, the RSS didn’t want that. So BJP supporters were ordered to take that slogan off the streets of Varanasi.

The Puri Shankaracharya seems even more clear-headed. Having travelled to Gujarat in the wake of the riots in 2002, in which at least 1000 Muslims were killed, he had pointed out that nobody who loved justice could “like” Modi. The man, he said, had committed so many “sins.”

According to the Puri Shankaracharya, the RSS was using religion to mislead the people. He said the RSS should come clean as a “political organisation”, one which had an agenda which would be plain to the people. But when the RSS described itself as a “socio-cultural body”, issuing statements that created “tension” in the country, the people were misled.