Popcorn and curfews
\nThe stock market will be shut, movie halls will show the launch live. But as the country comes to a standstill for a temple launch, anxiety and pain linger for those who remember the blood spilled in its wake
\nYavatmal\/Mumbai
\nFor a month now, mini-trucks have been snaking their way on labyrinth roads cutting across villages in Yavatmal district in central India.
\nYavatmal has been in the grip of agrarian distress so deep that more than 5,800 farmers have taken their own lives here in the last two decades, according to data provided by the local divisional collectorate.
\nBut these trucks haven\u2019t been carrying any relief for distressed farmers. Instead, with a photo of the Hindu god Ram on posters stuck on their sides, the trucks have been foraying deep inside the district, exhorting farmers to donate grains.
\nThe grains are headed to Ayodhya to feed hundreds of thousands of devotees visiting the city where Prime Minister Narendra Modi will consecrate a temple to Ram on January 22, over three decades after a mob led by Hindu nationalists tore down a mosque that stood on the spot.
\nThe trucks are being operated by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a part of the Hindu nationalist network Sangh Parivar led by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) that includes Modi\u2019s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
\nAt Yavatmal\u2019s Samvidhan Chowk, workers hurriedly load a large container truck with sacks of grains. \u201cWe have managed to fill three container trucks with these donations, and this is the fourth one,\u201d says VHP Vidarbha Prant President Raju Niwal. The idea, VHP volunteers on the spot say, is to mobilise farmers and make them \u201cfeel involved\u201d in the celebrations.
\nIt\u2019s a sentiment that the Modi government and its ideological allies have successfully managed to evoke across the country.
\nFor over seven decades, the movement to build the Ram temple in Ayodhya, at the spot where he is believed to have been born according to Hindu scriptures, had been shrouded in violence and bitter contestation.
\nClose to 2,500 people (PDF), according to a research paper by the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, were killed during the violence that broke out around the BJP-led agitation demanding a Ram temple in the early 1990s.
\nBut as Modi gets set to inaugurate the Ram temple, the country has been flooded by popular culture acts and symbols that ignore that troubled past, giving the Ram temple movement a benign image, and creating a lasting legacy for Modi among Hindus, say analysts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Popcorn and curfews The stock market will be shut, movie halls will show the launch live. But as the country comes to a standstill for a temple launch, anxiety and pain linger for those who remember the blood spilled in its wake Yavatmal\/Mumbai For a month now, mini-trucks have been snaking their way on labyrinth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":382056,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-382031","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n