Ayodhya Discontent: BJP's Surprising Defeat in the Shadow of Ram Mandir Consecration

OutlookIndia

The Ram mandir issue was the BJP’s calling card for more than three decades. So when it fulfilled its promise of building a temple in Ayodhya—whose consecration took place earlier this year in January, just a few months before the Lok Sabha elections—it seemed like a major victory for the saffron party. But the election result has produced a major twist, where the BJP lost in Ayodhya by over 50,000 votes. In January 2024, two weeks before the Ram mandir consecration, Outlook’s Tanul Thakur visited the temple town and found that, despite all the fervour surrounding the temple, disenchantment wasn’t too far from the perceived ‘development’.  Follow us: Website: https://www.outlookindia.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Outlookindia Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/outlookindia/ X: https://twitter.com/Outlookindia Whatsapp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaNrF3v0AgWLA6OnJH0R Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@OutlookMagazine Dailymotion: https://www.dailymotion.com/outlookindia  #BJP  #Ayodhya #RamMandir #LokSabhaElections

Transcript

00:00 Hello and welcome to Outlook Live. I am here with Tanul Thakur. You recently visited Ayodhya

00:06 and Varanasi. Ayodhya of course is from where the BJP's political project started and

00:11 it's where it's centred and Varanasi where Prime Minister Modi is contesting. So what

00:17 were your impressions when you went and how do they tally with what we are seeing today

00:21 on counting day?

00:22 Tanul Thakur Yeah, so I went to Ayodhya two weeks before the Ram Temple consecration.

00:28 Of course the mood there, I mean at least the overarching mood was very festive and

00:32 all of that, very celebratory. But I mean the thing with Ayodhya at least in January

00:37 was there are two parts of Ayodhya. Ayodhya was and I am sure still is entangled in this

00:42 elaborate game of hide and seek. What Ayodhya shows, what Ayodhya hides. I mean at one level

00:48 you could see that the air was kind of like awash with this festive spirit but just go

00:56 a little deeper and just start talking to people which is what I did. I figured out

01:00 that this so called like brosy-eyed story did hide some amount of darkness. I mean I

01:08 spoke to shopkeepers who said that the government decimated half of their shops in which they

01:14 used to live. It tossed them a meagre compensation and a lot of them were very very pissed. A

01:21 lot of them were very pissed also by the fact that the BJP government through the whole

01:27 Ram Temple project was trying to change the composition of the city as well. I remember

01:31 talking to a priest in the Prajapati temple and he said that like you know Ayodhya will

01:35 become like Goa now. He also said something which I will never forget which is essentially

01:39 that it almost feels as if somebody draped Ayodhya a jacket of gold but took its soul

01:44 away. And you could almost sense that there was some amount of resentment that was brewing

01:50 although I think I would be lying if I said that. I mean it would translate into what

01:54 we are seeing right now which is that the BJP is trailing, BJP's Lallu Singh is trailing

01:58 thereby more than 40,000 votes. I mean this is almost I mean to use a phrase I mean this

02:04 30 year long electoral what do you call it like foreplay which has not culminated in

02:11 the way a lot of BJP supporters and the BJP themselves would have thought. I mean the

02:16 Ram Temple and Ayodhya was supposed to catapult them to like higher electoral victories. It

02:21 does I mean on the other hand that hasn't happened. On the other hand they seem to be

02:26 losing well that kingdom itself. So what about Varanasi? What were the issues that people

02:34 were talking about and what were the issues that they were reluctant to talk about? Yeah

02:40 so I mean it's very interesting I mean the word reluctant that you use and I think anybody

02:46 who has followed election in any capacity would have heard this phrase that this is

02:52 an election of silence. That people, it's both about what people talk about but it's

02:58 also about what people do not talk about. So for instance I mean again at like if you

03:04 like look at Varanasi I mean in my experience at least like as a panoramic view people did

03:11 wax eloquent about PM Modi. They were happy that the Ghats have been revamped, Assi had

03:17 gotten a facelift and things like that which is also I mean true. You could see that there

03:24 were cosmetic changes in there and before I come to that there's something that I would

03:28 like to point out which is very striking to me in both Ayodhya and Varanasi which was

03:33 that both temple towns seem to follow a similar language of development which was that you

03:41 take an old like temple town or a religious place, you concentrate all your energies,

03:47 development and all of that within like a kilometre of that area. You impose on it a

03:54 very uniform aesthetic, say like same kinds of boards, dimensions, fonts and all of that

03:59 whether people like it or not and well the rest of the city can well just go whatever

04:06 itself. So that was something that was very striking to me in both Ayodhya and Varanasi.

04:12 Now coming back to what people were thinking about and what they were talking about, one

04:16 thing was for sure that I mean apart from the fact that they had gotten like this well

04:22 like a prime candidate as their MP and all of that and how he was trying to give the

04:27 city a facelift and you could see it in again like these very glitzy symbols of development

04:35 like say like a Namu Ghat which almost has become like a promenade of sorts, I mean it's

04:41 a mini Disneyland so to speak. So those were things but again like when I went to Dalmandi

04:48 for instance like this Muslim dominated area in Varanasi, a lot of people just straight

04:53 up refused to talk to me. I mean you could almost see the sense of like disconcerting

04:58 environment rippling through it. I mean one after the other they would just say that everything

05:03 is fine, we don't want to talk to you about it and all of that. So you could get some

05:08 sense that of course there is a lot of discomfort, there is a lot of add to that like the whole

05:13 Gyan Vapi controversy and all of that right and what's very interesting to me is that

05:18 I mean if you see the numbers, Narendra Modi's vote share as of now at least has decreased

05:24 from 64% to 54% while Congress's Ajay Rai's has increased from 14% to 41%. That says something

05:33 and it almost like kind of tallies in with the national mood of the election that's unfolding

05:38 in front of us right now.

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