Congress chief Rahul Gandhi and supporters stage a sit-in after being stopped by police personnel from visiting the Batadrava shrine, in Nagaon, Assam, on January 22, 2024.
| Photograph Credit score: ANI
Congress chief Rahul Gandhi in all probability had a sense of déjà vu when he was not allowed to enter Batadrava Than, the birthplace of Assam’s most revered non secular icon, on January 22, across the time Prime Minister Narendra Modi led the ‘Pran Pratishtha’ ceremony for the Ram Temple in Ayodhya. In December 2015, he was allegedly turned away from western Assam’s Barpeta Satra on a day he launched the Congress marketing campaign for the 2016 Meeting elections. A couple of weeks later, former Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal, now a Union Minister, launched his election marketing campaign for the Bharatiya Janata Celebration from the Uttar Kamalabari Satra in Majuli, an island-like landmass within the Brahmaputra River about 430 km east of Barpeta Satra.
There are an estimated 900 satras — monasteries of the neo-Vaishnav order — throughout Assam and past. Barpeta and Uttar Kamalabari are two of the foremost amongst them however they don’t seem to be on the identical degree of spirituality or reverence because the Batadrava Than situated roughly on the midpoint within the Nagaon district. A ‘than’ is greater than only a monastery that has a four-tier construction with a prayer corridor at its centre. And Batadrava, additionally spelled Bordowa, has been extra than simply an exalted place of worship for the adherents of the Ekasarana Dharma, a neo-Vaishnav monolithic type of spiritualism propagated by Fifteenth-Sixteenth Century saint-reformer Srimanta Sankaradeva. It’s what Jerusalem is for the Christians, Mecca is for the Sunni Muslims, and Ayodhya has grow to be for a lot of Hindus, whether or not or not they subscribe to the right-wing Hindutva.
Patronised primarily by the Ahom and Koch rulers, Sankaradeva and his disciples established the satras, which lorded over swathes of land donated by the native kings, elites, and devotees. After India’s independence, particularly after the creation of Bangladesh, many satras in central and western Assam turned central to the difficulty of “illegal immigrants”, a staple of electoral politics in Assam since a violent agitation of 1979-98 to eject non-citizens from the State. The alleged encroachment of satra land by Bengal-origin or migrant Muslims turned a rallying level for the BJP, which began build up momentum by the flip of the millennium earlier than coming to energy in 2016 in alliance with two regional events.
Probe panel
In 2021, the BJP-led authorities headed by Himanta Biswa Sarma constituted a three-member inquiry fee headed by Asom Gana Parishad MLA Pradip Hazarika with BJP legislators Mrinal Saikia and Rupak Sarma as its members. The interim report, ready after visiting 62 satras and interacting with the inmates of 303 satras, was submitted to the Chief Minister on December 3, 2022. The report mentioned about 1,900 hectares of land belonging to the 303 satras had been below encroachment, principally by the migrant Muslims. The “systematic” land-grabbing, the panel famous, started earlier than independence when the Muslim League shaped the federal government in undivided Assam within the late Thirties. It additionally mentioned 250 satras disappeared over the previous few many years as a result of their abbots and inmates had been compelled to go away by the encroachers. The report additional mentioned 74% of the encroachment on satra lands was within the minority-dominated Barpeta district and flagged Batadrava for particular consideration.
The BJP-led authorities didn’t cease at evicting the encroachers from the satra lands. Assam’s Income Minister Jogen Mohan advised the 126-member Meeting in March 2023 that the federal government freed 99% of the satra land inside three months. These squatters had been amongst 8.57 lakh folks illegally occupying authorities, forest, wetland, railway, and satra land throughout Assam, he mentioned. A 12 months earlier than the 2021 Meeting elections, the federal government declared an annual grant of ₹10 lakh per satra and ₹2.5 lakh per namghar, a neighborhood prayer corridor utilized by the followers of Sankaradeva. A mean of 70 households are related to a namghar, and the patrons of the namghars are often related to one satra or the opposite. This interprets right into a sizeable share of voters in an more and more polarised Assam.
It was, thus, not shocking for House Minister Amit Shah in February 2021 to put the inspiration stone for a ₹188-crore venture to develop Batadrava into a serious non secular and cultural tourism centre in India. Other than the optics, it despatched a message that the BJP means enterprise because the “saviour of Hinduism” from the “ghuspethiye” aka Bangladeshi folks. Weeks earlier than his high-profile programme, the Assam unit of Congress launched a bus yatra as a part of their Assam Boson Ahok (come, allow us to save Assam) marketing campaign from Batadrava, underscoring its political significance.
Nearly three years later, Rahul Gandhi’s yatra hit a rumble strip at Batadrava after its administration committee rescheduled his preprogrammed go to to the ‘than’ on January 22 to after 3 p.m., given the Ram Temple consecration. The Congress chief waited exterior as his celebration colleagues — native MP Gaurav Gogoi and native MLA Sibamoni Bora — had been let in across the time the Ayodhya occasion was being held. Mr. Gandhi mentioned the Batadrava authorities had been pressured by folks on the prime, which means the Chief Minister. However his lack of ability to go to the non secular website at his comfort conveyed that the BJP desires it identified it holds the copyright on key locations of worship that may swing Hindu sentiments in its favour.
