The Union government’s decision to bestow as many as six individuals, who, one way or another, played a significant role in furthering the Ayodhya Ram temple issue, underscores that the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) below par performance in last year’s Lok Sabha elections has not undermined its drive to reinforce Hindu majoritarian politics.
Undoubtedly, the BJP’s ideological perseverance, despite the Indian people pulling back some of the support they accorded the party since 2014, would be heartily welcomed by its core programmatic supporters.
At the same time, the failure of the BJP’s coalition partners in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), especially the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and the Janata Dal (U), to be assertive and instead choose to play second fiddle on the issue of selecting Padma awardees, will not be to the liking of a section of their electoral base, especially the minorities.
However, to be fair to the BJP’s alliance partners, no outsider can be privy to the manner in which the awardees were ‘cleared’ by the government. It remains unknown whether questions were ‘raised’ during ‘deliberations’ if held.
The decision to honour Sadhvi Rithambara with the Padma Bhushan is, nevertheless, undeniably questionable because she played a highly provocative role in the course of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, and in the events leading to the demolition of the Babri Masjid.
Even thereafter, she has been engaged over long periods of time, in perpetuating divisiveness and fanning prejudice against religious minorities, chiefly Muslims.
Paradoxically, the Sadhvi with a contentious track record was accorded the award in the ‘social work’ category, although there is no denying that she was chosen for her proactive and provocative role in the Ayodhya agitation and some of her political campaign in recent years.
By performing the Bhoomi Pujan and Pran Prathistha in Ayodhya, Ptime Minister Narendra Modi lent State patronage to a Hindu religious programme to its very core, thereby violating the secular spirit of the Constitution. By awarding someone like Rithambara, the government has once again legitimised an agitation that trespassed several laws of the land on numerous occasions.
The Padma awards this year were disbursed in a partisan manner. For instance, take the case of the lawyer who represented Ram Lalla Virajman in the Ayodhya case, CS Vaidyanathan. Is it not legitimate to ask whether his competence was awarded or his allegiance?
Likewise, are the cases of Padma Bhushan Chandrakant Sompura (architect who designed the Ram temple), Padma Shri Kishore Kunal, the late author of Ayodhya Revisited and others, all of whom were awarded various Padma awards solely because they were connected to, or aided the fruition of an agitation which, eventually left the religious minorities of India, especially Muslims, with just one option: assimilate into the fabric of Hinduism or face more attacks that may jeopardise their existence.
The award, in fact, is effectively recognition for her ‘lifetime achievements,’ the major part of which was to raise support for the more aggressive version of Hindutva.
Who is Sadhvi Rithambara?
It needs to be highlighted that Rithambara shot into limelight in the late 1980s and the early 1990s in the course of the Ayodhya agitation by conceptualising consistent vituperative campaigns that enabled to whip up the frenzy of Hindu youth, alongside the other stormy petrel of the Sangh Parivar of similar background, Uma Bharti.
Even though Bharti was for several decades better known, wielded more political clout and held several power positions, Rithambara has pipped the former to the award.
Reasons for this are many, including Bharti’s inability to play according to the rules framed by patriarchal male leaders of the BJP, and that her further rise in the party would have posed a threat to the careers of many who are now calling the shots.
Importantly, Bharti has been out in the cold in the BJP for the past few years and was not even included in the list of the party’s star campaigners during the 2023 Assembly polls in Madhya Pradesh and for the Lok Sabha polls last year.
But, she has not yet called it quits, as far as electoral politics is concerned, and is possibly awaiting a change of fortune.
Although considerable attention is being heaped on the orphanage for girls that Rithambara ran in Vrindavan, Uttar Pradesh, where she also provided education to the inmates to ensure they became self-sufficient individuals, her stature in the Sangh Parivar stems solely because she was one of the leading figures who mobilised support for the Ram Mandir agitation.
Latent Sexual Politics of Hindutva
In my 1994 book, The Demolition: India At The Crossroads, I briefly studied the phenomenon of Bharti and Rithambara whose speeches – ‘live’ as well as on audio-cassettes – in rallies across north India, greatly enabled the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) to enlist support for the movement.
At that time, only a “minuscule section of the followers of these two were females and the men who were drawn to them, came primarily out of the desire to see Hindu women who had the courage to question ‘centuries of subjugation of the Hindus, by the Islamic invaders and their ancestors’.”
Rithamabara particularly made a mark by goading her audiences, mainly unemployed youth and petty traders to "stir out of their impotency and give it back to them".
Rithambara's body language often had strong parallels to suggestive gyrations seen in popular Indian cinema.This, however, did not negatively impact the image of the two because both Bharti (by then she was bestowed with the moniker of ‘sexy sanyasin’ by a section of the media) and Rithambara got religious sanctity from their saffron robes.
Ode to Sangh Parivar
Over the past decade since PM Modi assumed office, several important leaders from the Sangh Parivar were honoured by Padma awards.
Most importantly, Lal Krishna Advani was awarded Bharat Ratna in March 2024 and Padma Vibhushan in 2015, while the third member of the BJP’s troika of leaders in the late 1980s and 1990s, Murli Manohar Joshi, was conferred the Padma Vibhushan in 2017.
Former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, too, was awarded the Bharat Ratna in 2015. Despite this backdrop, the award to Rithambara is ‘problematic’ because while the aforementioned leaders were active politicians for decades, the Sadhvi has her background in a political ‘agitation’.
Awarding her further ‘mainstreams’ this movement, which certainly was not a democratic agitation for the ‘rights’ of a section of people.
While the three BJP stalwarts held various constitutional posts in the course of their careers, Rithambara remained a political activist against whom several criminal charges were leveled.
Over and above, Rithambara was the founding chairperson of the Durga Vahini, the combative women’s wing of the VHP. She had also been part of the anti-Christian campaigns in the middle and late 1990s, besides very infamously in 2022, calling upon Hindus to give birth to four children and dedicate two of them to the cause of Hindu Rashtra.
Blurring Lines of Ideology and State
In recent years, under PM Modi’s leadership, the lines between (Hindu) religion and the State have been blurred considerably. As the PM, Modi sat in religious rituals on several occasions as the yajman (person performing the rituals or the yagya).
Most importantly, he performed such rituals in August 2020 and January 2024 in Ayodhya and in the Parliament Complex in December 2020 and May 2023 for the new Parliament building.
These acts however ‘objectionable’, it may appear to large sections of the Indian populace, would still pass muster for essentially being political acts of a PM who misses no opportunity to further his grip on political power.
However, bestowing State awards to those who played pivotal roles in the agitation that led to some of the most horrifying communal conflicts, takes matters to another level.
It becomes worse that these awards are declared along with those for several luminaries from various professional fields and cannot be contested because they are well-deserved.
It cannot be forgotten that the Ram Mandir agitation acquired momentum due to the call to Hindus to unite against religious minorities, especially Muslims, and Rithambara played a significant part in this.
(Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay is an author and journalist based in Delhi-NCR. He has authored several books including 'The Demolition, The Verdict and The Temple: The Definitive Book on the Ram Mandir Project', and 'Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times'. His X handle is @NilanjanUdwin. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)