Significance of Modi’s meditation at Kanyakumari

Narendra Modi deliberately combines Hindu rituals in his public persona for the political purpose of appealing to the Hindu masses.

Opposition parties have objected to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to meditate at Dhyan Mandapam at the Vivekananda Rock Memorial, and have approached the Election Commission of India to ban any telecast of it.

Since the meditation will last from the evening of May 30 when campaigning has to stop, to the evening of June 1 when polling ends, the Opposition has alleged that any publicity of the event would amount to indirect campaigning.

In 2019, Modi undertook a well-publicised 15-hour-long meditation in an isolated cave near the Kedarnath shrine in Uttarakhand, before the last phase of polling for the general elections. He had followed up this spiritual sojourn with a tweet urging the electorate to vote in large numbers on the last day of polling.

At the time the Opposition did not recognise the photo-ops at Kedarnath, and Modi’s subsequent tweet, as campaigning while the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) was in force. In retrospect, the Opposition is wiser.

The electoral contest is also much keener this time around. With the Opposition united in most parts of India, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is fighting tooth and nail with the I.N.D.I.A. bloc for every seat.

On June 1, apart from polling at Modi’s constituency Varanasi, there will also be voting in nine seats from West Bengal, among other seats. The contest is exceptionally keen between the BJP and Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress (TMC). Although the influence of Swami Vivekananda is pan-Indian among the Hindu community, perhaps it is nowhere more intense than in West Bengal where he enjoys iconic status. West Bengal is also where the Ramakrishna Mission, set up by Vivekananada, is headquartered at Belur Math in Howrah district. Banerjee had accused individual monks including one from the Rama Krishna Mission of campaigning for the BJP in the ongoing elections.

Banerjee came out all guns blazing, “Does anybody who meditates do it in front of a camera? He basically wants to show his meditation to people? … He cannot campaign like this. ...That will be a violation of the model code of conduct.”

The Congress has claimed that through the meditation trip, Modi was attempting to circumvent the 48-hour silence period and “unfairly leverage the ethno-cultural significance of the chosen location in an attempt to bolster his campaign and maximise his vote share in violation of the Representation of the People Act, as well as the Model Code of Conduct.”

The ECI, however, is yet to take a view on the complaint that the united Opposition has now filed.

It is uncertain whether telecasting Modi’s meditation will significantly impact the remaining nine seats in West Bengal. The battle lines between the BJP and TMC in West Bengal were drawn long ago that it is unlikely that the event in Kanyakumari will have any significant last-minute effect.

Why else then would Modi undertake this specific ritual, and at this specific site?

Modi deliberately combines Hindu rituals in his public persona for the political purpose of appealing to the Hindu masses. This is a part of his political persona and public behaviour.

He is known to enact publicised rituals like bathing in the Ganges during Kumbh in black clothes and washing the feet of five sanitary workers. He also visited six temples in the 11 days before the inauguration of the Ram temple at Ayodhya. These were: the Kalaram Temple at Maharashtra, Veerabhadra Temple in Andhra Pradesh, Guruvayur Temple and Thriprayar Shree Ramaswami Temple in Kerala, and Ranganathaswamy Temple in Tamil Nadu — all believed to be linked to Ayodhya and Lord Ram. He also declared that he would be following ‘yama niyam’ — defining restraint and moral conduct as specified in the Vedas — for the 11 days preceding the Ram temple inauguration.

On February 25, he donned scuba diving gear to offer prayers underwater at the submerged city of Dwarka in Gujarat. He was assisted by Indian Navy divers. Tweeting pictures of the event with him at the centre of it all, he tweeted after his underwater prayers.

However, meditating at Vivekananda Rock Memorial specifically will not only refurbish his image as a righteous Hindu leader but will reconnect him to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its project of Hinduising India. A meditation in the privacy of his home or his garden will not have the same significance. Vivekananda Rock Memorial is the brainchild of the RSS. It was an RSS proselytiser Eknath Ranade who conceived of the rock memorial as Swami Vivekananda is said to have meditated on the rocky outcrop at Kanyakumari in December 1892 for three days.

More than consolidating his Hindu support base, it is important for Modi to emphasise his ideological ancestry with the RSS and his commitment to its principles. There is speculation that in the event of the BJP falling substantially short of the majority in the elections, the RSS may press for a leadership change in the party to facilitate the formation of a coalition government led by the BJP.

Therefore, there is no reason to believe that he is simply taking time off at the Vivekananda Rock Memorial after the hurly-burly of the long election campaign. He is still politicking sitting at the extreme edge of India.

(Bharat Bhushan is a Delhi-based journalist.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.

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