Divine Narratives And Electoral Strategy: Lord Shiva In Indian Politics

Each year, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee actively participates in the Rath Yatra festivities organized by the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) in Kolkata. However, this year, Banerjee shifted her focus to the coastal town of Digha, where she oversaw the consecration of a grand, state-funded replica of the Jagannath temple of Puri.

This event marked more than just religious observance. It reflected Banerjee’s evolving strategy of fusing faith with state-sponsored spectacle.

Together, these spectacles signal a nuanced shift: an attempt to redefine Bengal’s public religiosity while subtly countering the BJP’s Hindu nationalist narrative through homegrown, culturally rooted alternatives.

The steady integration of religion into political discourse continues to evolve, as leaders increasingly turn to a wider range of deities to anchor their narratives. After decades of invoking Lord Ram and Lord Shiva as symbols of political identity and cultural assertion, attention is now shifting toward other gods and goddesses broadening the spiritual canvas of political mobilisation in India.

해외카지노 explored the reimagination of Shiva in India through its October 2022 issue: Recasting Shiva

In the issue, Ashutosh Bhardwaj looks at how BJP was trying to appropriate another God from the Hindu pantheon. Bhardwaj looked at BJP and how its politicians were terming Prime Minister Narendra Modi the incarnation of Lord Shiva and how the party went on an inauguration spree where it unveiled a 112-foot-tall Shiva statue in Coimbatore, and later inaugurated the Mahakal corridor in Ujjain.

Abhik Bhattacharya reported about the grand Mahakal Corridor Project in Ujjain where the BJP not only tried to reach out to Dalits and OBCs but also to use it as a grand narrative to win over the South where Shiva, not Ram, is the reigning.

Next, in this piece, author Devdutt Pattanaik explained how Lord Shiva plays a powerful role in both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, dismantling Ravana’s pride in the former, and humbling the mighty warrior Arjuna in the latter. These episodes highlight his transcendental authority across epics, not easily explained through historical reasoning alone; they belong more to the realm of symbolic and spiritual truth than to linear history.