‘Sitting on a volcano’: Two Indian temples clash as politics and faith mix

The Jagannath temple in Puri has been among Hinduism’s most sacred shrines for 1,000 years. Can an upstart challenge it?

Digha, India – On a hot and sultry June afternoon, Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of India’s West Bengal state, swept a sun-scorched road to make way for a towering chariot in Digha, a tourist town on the country’s Bay of Bengal coast.

The moment, captured by dozens of cameras and broadcast widely on television, on June 27, marked the launch of the eastern state’s first-ever government-sponsored Rath Yatra (“chariot festival”) to celebrate the construction of a sprawling temple complex built to house the Hindu god, Lord Jagannath.

First announced in December 2018, and completed in May this year, the Digha temple has been pitched by Banerjee and her governing Trinamool Congress (TMC) party as West Bengal’s alternative to the more popular Jagannath Temple in neighbouring Odisha state’s Puri town, about 350km (217 miles) away.

Built in the 12th century, the temple in Puri is one of Hinduism’s four major pilgrimage sites, and home to an annual 800-year-old chariot festival, a weeklong event attended by tens of thousands of devotees. To kick-start the festival, descendants of the erstwhile Puri kingdom’s rulers symbolically sweep the chariot path, like their ancestors in power once did.

At Digha, that task was performed by Banerjee, neither the descendant of an emperor, nor a priest, raising questions about whether the construction of the temple was about faith or politics, a year before one of India’s most politically significant states votes for its next government.