Kanwar Yatra as Hindutva’s tool

The Kanwar Yatra has always been a sight to behold swarms of mostly men walking down highways ferrying pitchers of the Ganga water suspended from colourful slings or Kanwars balanced on their shoulders as they walk a hundred kilometres and more to their villages Once there they offer the holy water to Shivlings in templesYet the sight with time has transformed increasingly in raucous groups many fetch the Ganga water in trucks and pickup vans with loud music blaring halting at makeshift stalls where they feast on sumptuous meals provided free The pilgrimage is also a time to party to engage in infractions as well The Kanwar Yatra grows into a bigger and bigger spectacle every passing yearThe yatrarsquos expansion is vividly recorded by anthropologist Satendra Kumar of University of Zurich in research papers he wrote based on his field studies conducted in 200405 and 201516 in villages of west Uttar Pradesh I read some of the papersmdashand also spoke to him In Meerutrsquos Khanpur village Kumar found that in the memory of those born in the 1950s and 1960s the Kanwar Yatra was not a momentous event Even in 200405 only two Khanpur residents had been on it But this number 10 years later grew to 30 comprising mostly members of the Other Backward Classes and Scheduled CastesThe yatrarsquos form as well as the reason for undertaking it changed Kumar cites the example of Khanpurrsquos Ramcharan Kashyap who pined for a grandson On a local hermitrsquos suggestion he embarked on the yatra to have his wish fulfilled Ramcharan walked alone to Haridwar In his absence the women of his family fasted fed the indigent and lit a lamp at a pipal tree When Ramcharan returned the holy Ganga water was offered at the Shiva temple as women sang devotional songs It was a quiet family affair The yatra was then a form of ldquofolk religiosityrdquo Kumar told meAt Khanpur a decade later Kumar met Ankit Akhilesh and Ramnaresh Ankit and Akhilesh were Dalit Ramnaresh OBC Both Ankit and Ramnaresh had passed Std X on their third attempt They went on the yatra hoping their expression of devotion for Lord Shiva would enable Akhilesh to secure recruitment in the state police force On their way to Haridwar they banded with three other SCs desperate to pass their school examinationThe yatra was a revelation people would give them way as if they were royalty At Purkazi in Muzaffarnagar a bearded Muslim motorcyclist bumped into them Enraged they beat him up Others joined the six as they set an eatery on fire and ransacked buses To Kumar Ankit compared their action to Lord Shivarsquos Tandavmdashthe dance of destructionKhanpurrsquos trio increasingly represents the typical participant of the Kanwar Yatramdashalienated lowercastelowerclass young man of rural India reeling under agrarian distress and employment crunch The introduction of OBC reservation and economic liberalisation in 199091 fanned aspirations It was almost a compulsion for the youth to escape rural India Yet a broken education system ensured he could compete only for poorly paid jobs in urban IndiaThe weakening family and kinship structure under stress as well could no longer be their refuge A new form of religiosity was required to negotiate the precarity of life It was at this juncture from the 1990s the Kanwar Yatra underwent a metamorphosis Behind its expansion Kumar notes were the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its affiliates establishing either directly or indirectly through their wealthy members stalls providing lavish meals and entertainment They reinterpreted and incorporated the folk or little tradition of the Kanwar Yatra as part of the Great Tradition of classical textual Hinduism On offer to the alienated youth is the middleclass Hindu identitySamajwadi Party leader Sudhir Panwar a resident of Shamli west Uttar Pradesh wrote an article in 2019 pointing out that the strongest impulse for the yatrarsquos expansion came after 2014 following the rise of Narendra Modi and Adityanath The State now became the yatrarsquos principal patron deploying its machinery to turn the annual pilgrimage into a carnival with helicopters showering rose petals on yatris and the administration blocking segments of highways for them Traffic snarls vicariously enhanced the yatrirsquos selfworthBut this is principally the carnival of subaltern casteclass participants whose identity is merged into castelessclassless nomenclature of Bholey a name of Lord Shiva with which all are addressed during the roughly 16day yatra This practice camouflages their low status and makes them experience ersatz equality It is also empowering because wealthy upper castes mostly Baniyas and the State fete them Panwar quipped to me ldquoWhile Bahujans go on yatra elitecaste members prepare for competitive examinationsrdquoThe yatra turns into a 16day festival of forgetfulness for the subalterns trapped in misery reduces the possibility of a challenge emerging from the underclass against the status quo and softens them for Hindutva politics Not surprisingly the controversial order asking eateries to display their ownersrsquo names during the Kanwar Yatra an obvious attempt at religious polarisation was first issued in Muzaffarnagar a Hindutva lab the Bharatiya Janata Party lost in the recent Lok Sabha electionsThe writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon Challenging CasteSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper