How Modi Turned a God Into a Weapon
5 min read
Throughout my childhood, I fell asleep in a world full of elephant gods, monkey armies, and eight-handed goddesses. Before bed, my grandmother would tell me stories from ancient Hindu epics as I snuggled against her soft cotton sari. My favorite was the Ramayana, the tale of an exiled prince named Ram who goes on a journey to save his wife and defeat an evil empire before returning home to claim his rightful throne. Like millions of Indian children, I saw Ram’s love, righteousness, and tolerance as a model for my own life.
Today, Indians are being shown a version of Ram that’s nothing like the figure I remember. Over the past decade, I’ve watched Prime Minister Narendra Modi render the deity as an avatar of violent nationalism. In his telling, Ram isn’t a broad-minded king but a wrathful avenger, ready to punish Muslims for their supposed offenses against India’s Hindu majority. Officials in Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) post images of Ram with six-pack abs, drawing his bow and arrow—a far cry from the Ram in my grandmother’s temple, who smiles beside his family. The politicization of Ram culminated earlier this year, when Modi consecrated a temple to the god on the same spot where Hindu radicals once demolished a centuries-old mosque. This was meant to incite Modi’s base of Hindu nationalists, whose devotion is a key reason Modi won a third consecutive term yesterday, even as the BJP seems to have lost a significant number of seats in Parliament.
Modi’s transformation of Ram is part of a decades-long attempt by India’s right wing to “Hinduize” one of the most religiously diverse countries in the world—the birthplace of not only Hinduism but also Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. Modi presents India’s 200 million Muslims as “infiltrators” and suggests that Ram can subdue them. But using Ram as a political weapon defiles the great achievement of modern India: religious tolerance. It defiles Hinduism, too, by undermining one of its fundamental teachings—nonviolence—and turning its hero into a monster.
Hindu mythology maintains that when Ram became king, he established a utopian society defined by social harmony, justice, and noncoercion (ahimsa)—values that would influence Mahatma Gandhi and help enshrine nonviolence as a cultural ideal in postcolonial India. Modi has now made Ram a mascot for the destruction of those same values, as Hindu nationalists have assaulted Sikhs and Muslims, torched an Islamic library, and lynched minorities. The perpetrators of attacks such as these have chanted “Jai Shri Ram”—“Victory to Lord Ram”—a rallying cry for nationalists around the country.
Nobody has corrupted Ram’s image like Modi has, but he isn’t the first to change it. Since the Ramayana was composed, some 2,500 years ago, it has been told and retold, each time a little differently. Like other enduring epics, it got folded into local customs as it traveled. India’s Ramayana is very different from the one in Indonesia, where the story made room for Javanese gods. Politics have changed the Ramayana too. According to Ankur Barua, a scholar of Hinduism at the University of Cambridge, Hindus started to depict a more militaristic Ram during the British occupation of India, when imperial soldiers occasionally showed up in iconography as bloodied victims or vanquished demons.
India’s Muslims became central characters in Ram’s story in December 1992. In Ayodhya, where Modi recently consecrated his temple, Hindus stormed a mosque that was built in 1528, spurring protests that killed nearly 2,000 people, mostly Muslims. The Hindu mob thought that the mosque stood on the site of Ram’s birth, a belief that had inspired antagonism between Hindus and Muslims for more than a century. After the mosque was destroyed, a new era in Indian politics began. The BJP’s influence expanded as it pledged to replace the Ayodhya mosque with a Ram temple. A long legal dispute ensued over whether such a temple could be built, putting Ram at the center of a nationalist campaign that pitted Hindus against Muslims. Modi took office in 2014; five years later, a verdict from India’s supreme court cleared the way for him to fulfill his party’s promise. In an echo of 1992, the recent consecration also prompted violence against Muslims, though on a smaller scale.
Indian law prohibits politicians from making religious appeals to voters, but the new Ram temple features regularly in Modi’s speeches as well as in BJP’s manifesto. Its consecration—equal parts reelection bid and religious spectacle—was a clear violation of India’s secular democratic norms: In India, temples are consecrated by priests, not prime ministers. Virtually every news channel broadcast Modi’s election-year stunt. The government declared a national holiday, closing banks, courts, and hospitals across the country. Last month, Modi went back to Ayodhya and staged a political rally. By associating himself with Ram and taking on the mantle of Hindu nationalism—even telling supporters that he was chosen by God—Modi has tried to distract from the high unemployment, rising prices, and hunger crisis that have marked his tenure as prime minister.
But in transforming Ram, Modi has done much more than advance his own political ends. As stories such as the Ramayana are retold, they preserve their culture’s traditions and distill its values. They provide heroes, meaning, and lessons that remain useful across time. Now one of India’s most important stories—one that embodies the kind of tolerance that the modern constitution promises—is being replaced with a cooked-up tale of resentment and bigotry. It presumes that India is a Hindu nation, and that achieving peace and unity is simply a matter of subjugating, or expelling, the Muslims who live here.
As a Hindu, I find that story not only repugnant but also absurd. Before my grandmother died, she taught me that Hinduism loses nothing by tolerating other religions. Her Hinduism was not threatened by Muslims praying in public, eating meat in their own house, or marrying people who don’t share their faith. Her Hinduism was light enough to carry in her memory, preserved by the stories that she was told as a kid and that she used to tell me. When those stories are lost, so is faith—not just religious faith, but faith in the kind of society they describe.
The BJP’s poor showing yesterday, which included losing the constituency that houses the Ram temple, suggests that Indians are beginning to see through Modi’s nationalist myth. They have an opportunity to reclaim the stories that helped form the country’s ideals—and that can now help save them. As violence and prejudice have become chronic, India’s children need those stories more than ever.
