For the Bengalis, the coastal town Puri in Odisha is a major travel destination. What draws them principally to the seaside temple city is to pay homage to Lord Jagannath at the shrine built in his honour centuries ago and also to make the best of the sea and the beach. In fact, next only to the Odias, the Bengalis constitute the overwhelmingly large percentage of visitors to Puri among all Indians. Take a walk along the Puri beach you will find signages of all shops and restaurants written in Bengali, Odia and English. All these establishments are patronised by the Bengalis.
The Odisha State Tourism Department will confirm the annual growth in tourist inflow from Bengal leaves every other region well behind and more and more well-heeled Bengalis have started visiting Puri. The place now boasts of some excellent hotels and resorts. In the circumstances when a new temple resembling the one at Puri was recently commissioned at West Bengal’s seaside town at Digha, many Bengalis may come to pay their obeisance at the new shrine instead of going to Puri. Since its opening on April 30, inflow of pilgrims and tourists has surged beyond expectation of Mamata Banerjee government and the temple administration.
Donations by the faithful are so high that the administration is installing more and more collection boxes at strategic points in the temple complex. Will a prospering Digha temple then not be at the cost of Puri? We will have the answer after some years. But the more important issue involved in commissioning a temple at Digha is whether a state government should dabble in religion, going to the extent of building a temple.
Religion as long as it remains confined to individuals and there is civilised tolerance of different faiths, peace prevails. But once it spills into public space and attempts are made to assert dominance of a particular religion as we are witnessing here and in some neighbouring countries, religion becomes the reason for strife among communities and also among nations. That then becomes the cause of untold miseries among people and derailing of economic progress.
Our first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru understood the importance of the public faces of the government from the President to ministers not to be involved in religious ceremonies such as inauguration of a temple. But as it would be the case, Nehru could not prevail upon President Rajendra Prasad not to attend the ceremony commissioning the rebuilt Somnath temple in 1951. (The temple in Gujarat was invaded, looted and destroyed more than once. But the most destructive attacks that befell Somnath temple were in 2025AD and then in the following year by Mahmud of Ghazni, a ruler from the Ghaznavid empire.)
At the time of inauguration of Somnath temple, the memories of communal riots and killings in Punjab and Bengal had not yet faded and perhaps the last thing that Nehru wanted was stoking of communal passion in any way. Last year, the three Congress leaders, namely the party president Mallikarjun Kharge, Sonia Gandhi and Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury “respectfully declined” the invitation to attend the much-trumpeted inauguration ceremony of Ram Mandir at Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, since RSS-BJP had made a “political project of the temple.”
Having already complained that the consecration of the idol of Lord Rama was to be done in haste even though the temple construction had remained incomplete for electoral benefits of BJP, the Congress presence in the ceremony was in any case not expected. Ram Mandir might have given the politically embattled Congress to shout the odds, but politicians in the country except for leftists would not spare a thought before using religion for solely electoral benefits. Rahul Gandhi would visit Hindu temples and Arvind Kejriwal recite Hanuman Chalisa.
From Muhammad Ali Jinnah to Shyama Prasad Mukherjee to many present-day BJP leaders, India unfortunately has a long tradition of politicians being cynical about using religion for political gains. Us standing today with communal passions running high in many parts of the country, Nehru had the foresight to say decades ago: “The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organised religion, in India and elsewhere, has filled me with horror and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always, it seemed to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition, exploitation and the preservation of vested interests.”
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Long many years after Nehru made bold to refer to the corrosive influence of religion on acceptable human behaviour, thanks to the pursuit of Hindutva by the ruling regime at the centre and in majority of states, proneness of politicians to fall back on religion instead of scientific reasoning has assumed disturbing proportions.
BJP leaders will not tire of running down Nehru who spent his life in instilling a scientific temper among Indians irrespective of religion. Unfortunately, faith and dogma have triumphed over reason with the saffronites becoming increasingly raucous about promoting one particular religion. Resolutely secular, Nehru advocated and practised that the state should remain immune to religious influences in governance and policy-making. Basically, in matters of state, religion should not have a place. If the Nehruvian principles were followed, then the country would have been spared communal strife and people of different faith would have lived peacefully and prospered.
Why blame RSS-BJP combine alone for mixing religion with politics. Even West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee whose secular credentials have never been in doubt but always has to swat away accusations of favouring the Muslim community for its votes is now found to be pandering to the Hindus, in a balancing act. She is inviting criticism and rightly so for using at least Rs250 crore government fund to build a temple for Lord Jagannath and his siblings Lord Balabhadra and goddess Subhadra.
A replica of the 12th century Puri temple, the shrine at seaside at Digha over 20 acres of land is an architectural marvel. Built with red sandstone quarried from Bansi Paharpur in Rajasthan, the Digha temple being run by ISKON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness) is open to people of all faiths unlike Puri temple where only the Hindus could give prayers. All that is fine. But the question that remains is whether India being a secular country should either the central or a state government be involved in building temples or any other places of worship. Whatever Banerjee may say, providing a skywalk at Dakshineswar temple or at Kalighat Kali temple is not the same as building a temple. Pilgrims in great numbers visit Dakshineswar and Kalighat round the year and the government is obliged to strengthen the infrastructure in the two places and also other centres of pilgrimage for the benefit of believers, religion being no factor.
Having built the temple at Digha drawing funds from the state exchequer, Banerjee no doubt was under some kind of pressure to do something major for the second largest religious community in West Bengal. Will not this explain why soon after the inauguration of Digha Jagannath temple, the state government made a major announcement of comprehensive development of 75 sq km Furfura Sharif region. The focus will be on promotion of pilgrimage to the major centre of worship by the Muslims while preserving historical places and structures in improved environmental surroundings. The upshot of all this is that the government should not dabble in religion, whatever the likelihood of electoral dividends. Nehru looks so relevant today.
Whatever be all the considerations to build a shrine for Jagannath at Digha, Banerjee didn’t expect the project would be embroiled in a controversy with Puri’s Shree Jagannath Temple Administration (SJTA) taking objection to describing the new seaside temple in West Bengal as Digha Jagannath Dham. The chief servitor of Jagannath temple Daitapati Bhabani Das Mohapatra would quote from scriptures to say that the only four Dhams in the country are at Puri, Dwarka, Badrinath and Rameshwaram and “you can’t have a fifth or a sixth Dham.” Moreover, he complains that the West Bengal did not consult either Puri temple authorities or Puri king Gajapati Maharaja or the Orissa government before naming the Digha shrine.
So hurt are the sentiments of Odias that their chief minister Mohan Charan Majhi was constrained to urge his West Bengal counterpart to reconsider describing Digha temple as Dham. He writes: “The name ‘Jagannath Dham’ holds a unique and sacrosanct identity linked to Puri, and its usage in reference to any other temple or location hurts sentiments and emotions of millions of pilgrims besides diluting heritage of Shree Jagannath Dham, Puri.” This is not all. The Odisha government has started the process of securing trade mark rights for phrases like Jagannath Dham, Shree Mandira, Neelachal Dham, Bada Danda and Maha Prasad. The process is time-consuming. Hopefully, the two eastern states will be able to find a solution to the controversy surrounding Dham.
