How the Sangh Parivar transformed Bharat Mata into a militant Goddess

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How the Sangh Parivar transformed Bharat Mata into a militant Goddess

by Guest Thu Apr 07, 2016 10:09 am

A temple to Bharat Mata had come up in in Varanasi in the 1920s, and another came up in the pilgrimage town of Haridwar in the mid-1980s. It was built by Swami Satymitranand Giri, a Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader praised in temple handbooks for having raised substantial funds from the non-resident children of Bharat Mata. The English guidebook – Bharat Mata Mandir, A Candid Appraisal – said Swami’s decision to build the temple arose from a vision. “In all ancient cultures, the Divine mother is the cause off (sic) Creation,” said the booklet. “It is hoped that the visit to this shrine… will inspire devotion and dedication to Mother-Land.”

Six weeks after the area for the temple was consecrated, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad mounted its Ekatmata Yajna, a carefully planned month-long event during which trucks disguised as chariots doubled up as mobile Bharat Mata temples. These trucks transported images of the mother goddess or Bharat Mata with pots of Ganga water all over India for mass rituals of public worship by all her deemed children (read Hindu nationalists). This made Bharat Mata, or the concept of the nation as a militant goddess, a distinct all-India phenomenon. This was also when it became certain that the political arm of the Sangh Parivar – the Bharatiya Janata Party – would use the cult of Bharat Mata to whip up support for a Hindu rashtra and consolidate Hindu votes in its favour, like it did in the ’90s with the yet-to-be built Ram temple in Ayodhya.

The floors above the Bharat Mata shrine in Haridwar house shrines to shoor (military heroes), sants or saints and Satis or pious widows who chose to burn themselves on their husbands’ pyres. A floor dedicated to great spiritual teachers is dominated by statues of the mystic Ramakrishna, and his disciple Vivekanand. There is also a statue of Sri Aurobindo, but none for his spiritual collaborator, Mirra Alfassa, better known as the Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Puducherry. The only woman honoured with a statue in the temple complex is Sharada Ma, the wife and disciple of Ramakrishna.

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