Development and aastha: The new temples of modern India

It is a myth that high-profile religious and political projects have little to do with development

Last month, Prime Minister Narendra Modi attended several high-profile events, most of which were widely seen to be political in nature. One was the launch of the Rojgar Mela, where 75,000 people were handed over appointment letters for government jobs as part of the prime minister’s promise to create one million such opportunities in the run-up to the 2024 general elections. In the run-up to the Gujarat elections, three huge development projects — the Vedanta-Foxconn semiconductor factory, the Airbus-Tata military transport manufacturing facility, and the ArcelorMittal-Nippon Steel expansion project — were snared by the state. Third, there was his widely televised participation at Ayodhya’s Deepotsav, where 18 lakh diyas were lit, accompanied by spectacular fireworks and laser shows.

These events had electoral connotations, sending out the message that the Modi government is focused on development, jobs, and the religious beliefs of Hindus (aastha). In the “secular” dictionary, development is often pitted against aastha, with the latter seen to be pandering to sectarian impulses. This is one reason why one of the suggested solutions to the Ram Janmabhoomi dispute was to build a hospital or an educational institution at the disputed site. Luckily, the Supreme Court did not think that way, paving the way for a Ram temple that will surely draw millions of Hindus and tourists to Ayodhya. It is a myth that development and aastha are opposed to one another. They go together.

The prime minister has been keen to initiate or inaugurate Hindu religious (and political) projects almost every other year ever since he was elected in 2014. It began with the Char Dham Highway (2016), the Adiyogi (Shiva) statue put up by Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev (2017) in Coimbatore, the Ram Temple Bhoomi Puja (2020), the Kashi-Vishwanath Corridor (2021), and the inauguration of the Statue of Equality (dedicated to Vaishnavite Saint Sri Ramanujacharya) in Hyderabad earlier this year. In between, in 2018, Mr Modi inaugurated the world’s tallest statue, Sardar Patel’s, in his home state of Gujarat.

The myth one needs to dispel is the assumption that such high-profile religious and political projects have little to do with development. A popular temple is not about religiosity alone; it enables the development of an ecosystem for commerce, charity and infrastructure, too. Roads and infrastructure tend to get improved over time, guest houses and hotels and restaurants spring up, small and medium businesses rise to support the influx of pilgrims that usually follows such developments.

The Tirumala-Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD), India’s richest temple, has an annual budget of more than Rs 3,000 crore, which is bigger than the internal revenues generated by some of the smaller states like Sikkim (before central transfers). So, rest assured, when the Ayodhya temple opens for the public in 2024 or thereabouts, built at a cost of Rs 1,800 crore or more, its economic impact will rival that of the TTD or even India’s globally celebrated monument, the Taj Mahal. Ayodhya will have an appeal not only for Hindus, but for tourists from all over the world. Consider what it will do for the economy in eastern Uttar Pradesh, one of the poorest regions of the country.

The economic impact of political and religious projects often exceeds the immediate political gains made from those associated with them. Mr Modi inaugurated the Sardar Patel statue in 2018, but before Covid, early estimates of revenue from ticket sales and laser shows indicated that they may rival that of the Taj. Ayodhya will more than pay for itself over the years, spreading incomes all around its hinterland.

Equally, one can assume that the modern mosque being planned by Muslims who were given free land as compensation in the Supreme Court’s Ayodhya verdict, will also be a crowd-puller, creating its own healthy growth ecosystem for the minority community.

If we accept this hypothesis, there is not only a political imperative, but an economic one, to solve the disputes at Kashi and Mathura, preferably through direct negotiations between Hindu and Muslim groups, with the latter being compensated on the lines of the Ayodhya verdict.

Illustration: Binay Sinha

Two ideas from the corporate world are useful in our analysis here. First, conglomerate demergers often enable faster growth and higher shareholder value creation when unrelated businesses are unbundled. In the religious context, “demerging” the mosque from the temple will enable both to grow their own supportive ecosystems, something that would not have happened if the dispute was allowed to fester. Does it not make sense to do the same with Kashi and Mathura, purely on economic grounds? No religious community wants to share space with another, for it inhibits both, and also leads to conflicts.

The second idea is privatisation — again a widely accepted concept to make public sector assets generate higher value in private hands. This brings up the case of temples that are now firmly under state control, around 1,00,000 of them in the five southern states alone. If these temples, after suitable legislative changes, are privatised over the next five to 10 years, they will become engines of growth under devotee and stakeholder management. Of course, no private group may yet be ready to run large temples immediately, but this capability can be created, and smaller temples can be freed first to let local communities manage them on their own.

If privatisation of public sector companies is good for stakeholder value, surely the same logic should apply to temples too? If the assumption is that places of worship are best left to governments, does the same logic not apply to churches and mosques, not to speak of the various temples run privately and by various Mutts?

It was a travesty of the Nehruvian state to believe that only steel plants, dams, and IITs constitute the “temples of modern India”. In the process, a more emotive form of economic growth, led by religious institutions and temples, was ignored. It is time to debunk the myth that religious infrastructure and construction pander to narrow-mindedness while highways and telecoms are “good” types of development spending. Both constitute “public goods”, with enormous potential to create growth and livelihoods. Infrastructure and construction related to religious projects serve citizens not only in a secular way, but also to emotional health. A country of prosperous and confident people does not need to choose between development and aastha, especially if both are defined in a narrow way by socialists and liberals. If religion is the opium of the masses, soul-less development is the opium of the “secular socialist liberal” elite in India. Development and aastha go together.

The writer is the editorial director of Swarajya magazine