Digha’s Jagannath Temple inauguration is TMC’s Ram Temple moment

West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee ensures grand inauguration of Jagannath Temple in Digha, challenging BJP's "fake-Hindu" allegations.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee-led administration is leaving no stone unturned to ensure that the inauguration of Jagannath Temple, built at a cost of ₹250 crore, in West Bengal’s coastal town of Digha on Wednesday (April 30, 2025) is a grand success.

The Trinamool chairperson arrived in the tourist town in Purba Medinipur district a day earlier and has been personally supervising the last-minute arrangements for Wednesday’s “Prana Pratistha (consecration ceremony)” for which invitations have been extended to top State officials, industry captains, religious heads of almost every Hindu order in West Bengal, apart from senior Trinamool leaders.

The town has been decked up with lights and yellow ‘Jai Jagannath’ flags, and a devotional song praising Lord Jagannath, composed by the Chief Minister, is being played at every intersection.

The party leadership has been directed to ensure that the consecration ceremony is livestreamed on giant screens in every locality of the State. AI-generated profile pictures of most of the TMC leaders have flooded social media.

In the highly polarised political landscape of West Bengal, the Jagannath Temple is the ruling party’s answer to the allegations of being “fake-Hindu” levelled at it by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). “Jai Jagannath” is going to be the Trinamool’s answer to the BJP’s war cry of“Jai Shri Ram”. 

The much-awaited inauguration of the temple, a replica of the shrine in Puri, is, in other words, the Trinamool’s Ram Temple moment.

While Ms. Banerjee has renovated temples in the past and installed skywalks at Kolkata’s famous Kalighat and Dakshineswar temples, the inauguration of Jagannath Temple makes a further push at burnishing the Trinamool’s “soft Hindutva” credentials. The party, which awards a monthly honorarium to imams and muezzins and awards incentives worth hundreds of crores every year to Durga Puja committees in the State, has never shied away from mixing religion with politics. With the temple in Digha, the TMC wants to take on the BJP at its own game by building its support base among Hindus while offsetting religious polarisation.