Millions bathe in sacred waters during the Kumbh Mela, India’s Hindu mega-festival (CHANDAN KHANNA)

Allahabad (India) (AFP) – India’s Hindu mega-festival Kumbh Mela is in full flow, with millions bathing in sacred rivers. With elections in sight, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made sure it’s awash with politics too.

Modi faces a tough fight in national elections due by May, with discontent over rising joblessness denting his image and the opposition emboldened by state poll victories late last year.

So here at the Kumbh, huge posters of Modi — who with his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) espouses “Hindutva”, the hegemony of Hindus — dot the vast festival grounds in northern India.

Other banners feature Yogi Adityanath, the Hindu monk and Modi ally running 200-million-strong Uttar Pradesh (UP), host state of the festival and part of the “Cow Belt” region that propelled the BJP to power in 2014.

Since being elected, the BJP has tried to enforce its brand of Hindu nationalism on the officially secular country, emboldening Hindu hardliners and spooking religious minorities.

In UP, the saffron-robed Adityanath has launched a crackdown on the slaughter of cows — considered sacred by many Hindus — and last year changed the name of the Kumbh’s host city to Prayagraj from the Islamic-sounding Allahabad.

The city has been covered with murals depicting Hindu symbols and sages.

Trucks fitted with giant LED screens roam around the Kumbh grounds with pictures of Modi and Adityanath, special stalls showcase government welfare schemes and even some police hand out BJP calendars.

“Modi and Yogi are our pride and saviours of Hindus. They will do anything for us,” Sharad Kumar, one of the more than 100 million pilgrims expected to visit over the next few weeks, told AFP.

“They are hijacking the religious event and using it to further their electoral politics,” Chaudhary Jitender Nath, a former Allahabad mayor from the opposition Congress party, told AFP.

– Overdrive –

Speculation is rife that Modi will put in an appearance, the first premier to do so at this gathering since Indira Gandhi in 1966.

But it is not only religion that explains his wish to be associated with the festival. 

Successfully staging such a vast event burnishes his party’s reputation of having the pragmatic efficiency needed to improve the lives of India’s 1.25 billion people.

A lack of jobs and widespread rural distress with thousands of farmer suicides have dented the BJP’s image in this respect, as did a badly managed demonetisation scheme in 2016.

Modi’s government has splashed out $600 million on the Kumbh, three times the 2013 budget, and the government has been in overdrive to promote the festival at home and abroad. 

“Kumbh is a major Hindu festival and it’s natural the BJP would use all its energies to make it grand,” Gurpreet Mahajan, politics professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, told AFP.

“Even if they hadn’t lost the state elections or seen a dip in popularity, the BJP would have still used the festival to connect with ordinary Hindus.”

– Free spectacles –

Also out in force are thousands of volunteers from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a hardline Hindu group and the BJP’s tub-thumping ideological mentor, distributing free spectacles.

But there are rumblings among them that Modi has disappointed, in particular over plans for a temple in the flashpoint city of Ayodhya on the site of a medieval mosque razed by Hindu zealots in 1992.

In the riots that followed the mosque’s destruction, more than 2,000 people — mostly from India’s Muslim minority, who make up some 14 percent of the population — died nationwide in some of the worst communal violence in independent India.

Calls to erect the new temple at the 1989 Kumbh Mela triggered a wave of zealous support that helped save the Hindu nationalist BJP from oblivion, ultimately leading to its emphatic election win five years ago.

Construction of the new temple has been held up in the courts for years, however, irking hardliners who want Modi to step in.

An RSS affiliate, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), is planning to raise the pitch by staging a march from the Kumbh to Ayodhya once the festival wraps up on March 4.

“We are here to unite Hindus,” Sujeet Kumar, a VHP leader at the fair, told AFP.

“This time the road to Delhi passes through Kumbh and Ayodhya.”

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