Mumbai: Ahead of this year’s Lok Sabha and Maharashtra assembly polls, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the state is actively campaigning among temple managements, religious and spiritual groups, tapping into their vast base of devotees and talking up the Modi government’s work for Hindutva and spirituality, ThePrint has learnt.
The party is doing this through its seven-year-old ‘Adhyatmik Aghadi’ — a front formed in 2017 in Maharashtra, to coordinate with the state’s Hindu religious and spiritual leaders and organisations.
With about two months to go for the start of this year’s election season, the ‘Adhyatmik Aghadi’ (which translates to spiritual front) has appointed campaign heads for all of Maharashtra’s 48 parliamentary seats and 288 assembly segments to spread the party’s message on the Modi government’s work, members of the front told ThePrint.
These representatives are going from village to village, holding kirtans (programmes of devotional songs) and meetings where they highlight the Modi government’s work such as building a Ram temple in Ayodhya, restoration of rivers considered to be holy among Hindus, development of pilgrimage circuits and so on, the members of BJP’s Adhyatmik Aghadi added.
They also talk about the Narendra Modi-led BJP government’s developmental work, emphasising how it has been possible because the ruling party’s leaders are spiritual by nature.
“2024 is fully an election year, and looking at the way the BJP and Modi ji have been helping the spiritual world, the Adhyatmik Aghadi is committed to ensuring the BJP comes back to power at the Centre and in Maharashtra. The 48 Lok Sabha pramukhs (chiefs) and Vidhan Sabha pramukhs will fully concentrate on elections and give the party whatever support it needs,” Tushar Bhosale, head of the BJP’s Adhyatmik Aghadi, told ThePrint.
Although Adhyatmik Aghadi was in existence during the 2019 elections as well, its contribution to the BJP’s election campaign was limited as the organisational numbers were much less.
“We still campaigned in 2019 in our limited capacity, but this time there’s a much more organised effort. Our presence has expanded. We have more strength,” said Sanjay Dhondage, the Adhyatmik Aghadi leader in charge of the Dindori parliamentary constituency in Nashik district.
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BJP’s Adhyatmik Aghadi
The BJP formed its Adhyatmik Aghadi in the state in 2017 with party leader Ram Kadam as its head. This organisation, however, first came into limelight in 2020 when it led a state-wide protest demanding that the then Uddhav Thackeray-led Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government — comprising the then united Shiv Sena, the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party — open temples for devotees that were shut owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. By then, Bhosale had taken over as the leader of the Adhyatmik Aghadi.
“The BJP has such wings in other states for specific purposes — temples or saints. But, in Maharashtra, our wing caters to anyone and everyone who falls under the umbrella of spiritualism. The Warkari sect is the mainstream [religious] sect in Maharashtra. Then there are Ramdasi, Art of Living, Ramdev Baba, Jagadguru Narendra Maharaj, then there are saints, kirtankars [who sing devotional songs], pravachankars (those who give religious sermons), temple trusts, and so on. Our job is to coordinate with them all and get their issues resolved with our government’s help,” Bhosale said.
Bhosale, who said he used to attend Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh shakhas as a child and has been a BJP worker, was a founding member of the Adhyatmik Aghadi when it had just eight state office bearers in 2017.
The organisation has now swelled to having 54 office bearers and 71 district-level committees for Maharashtra’s 36 districts, with each committee having more than 50 members and 15 coordinators for various segments of spiritualism in Hindutva — a kirtankar segment, a sadhu segment, a warkari segment, a devasthan segment and so on.
Bhosale claims that the network of the Adhyatmik Aghadi is now so vast that if there is any incident anywhere in the state related to a Hindutva or spiritual organisation, the Aghadi gets to know about it within 30-45 minutes.
He said that this is how the organisation got involved in an incident at the Triambakeshwar temple in May last year after it was alleged that a group of Muslims tried to forcibly enter the temple premises. While the police filed an FIR against the accused, Muslims said that it was an age-old tradition to pay respects to the deity by going to the steps of the temple and showing fragranced smoke to the deity.
“Some members called us, informing us about the incident. We immediately took it up with the state government after which Deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis constituted a Special Investigating Team to probe the matter,” Bhosale said.
He added that the Adhyatmik Aghadi was also instrumental in getting Prime Minister Narendra Modi to inaugurate a rock temple at Sant Tukaram Maharaj Mandir, dedicated to the 17th-Century saint, in Dehu near Pune.
BJP’s ‘adhyatmik’ poll push
Dhondage said he has held at least 17 meetings across the Dindori parliamentary constituency in the past three months, addressing villagers and talking up the Modi government’s “commitment to Hindutva and spiritualism”.
“A large part of Maharashtra belongs to the Warkari sect. Also, in every village, we noticed, there is at least one Ram temple. People have had tears in their eyes when we talk about how grand a Ram temple is being constructed in Ayodhya — something that they never thought was possible,” Dhondage said.
Coordinators like Dhondage are also paying extra attention to the needs of major temple trusts, saints, and spiritual organisations to get them fulfilled and gain the trust of their devotees.
For instance, in the Nashik district, Dhondage had received requests for infrastructural upgrades at the Saptashrungi Mata temple. “We took up the matter with the government and got a budget of Rs 80 crore sanctioned for the development works,” Dhondage said.
After the inauguration of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya on 22 January, a few members of the Adhyatmik Aghadi plan to bring back soil from the temple’s surroundings and take it to villages under their jurisdiction, Rajesh Degloorkar, who is in charge of the Nanded parliamentary constituency for the BJP Adhyatmik Aghadi, told ThePrint.
Degloorkar has held at least 100 meetings at the main village squares in his constituency so far.
“We talk about how the scrapping of Article 370 giving special status to Jammu & Kashmir and the Citizenship Amendment Act is good for Hindutva. We talk about how this government has grown India’s economy and how leaders such as Narendra Modi, Yogi Adityanath, Amit Shah, Nitin Gadkari, and Devendra Fadnavis can work fearlessly because these are leaders with a strong spiritual belief of what is right and wrong,” Degloorkar said.
In their conversations with the electorate, members of the Adhyatmik Aghadi avoid comments on controversial topics such as religious conversions or love jihad, or political criticism of other parties unless it is related to temples and spirituality such as the ban on temples during Covid, he said.
“We are political, but our agenda is not political. People might be getting superficial information from social media. Our agenda is to put everything in perspective of spirituality and Hindutva. We highlight how for the first time in 75 years, we have a leader who is committed to spirituality and Hindutva and that is why we are seeing speedy development and non-corruption,” Degloorkar said.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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