Popcorn and curfew: India gets ready for Ram temple with frenzy and fear

The stock market will be shut, movie halls will show the launch live. But as the country comes to a standstill for a temple launch, anxiety and pain linger for those who remember the blood spilled in its wake.

Yavatmal/Mumbai, India – For a month now, mini-trucks have been snaking their way on labyrinth roads cutting across villages in Yavatmal district in central India.

Yavatmal has been in the grip of agrarian distress so deep that more than 5,800 farmers have taken their own lives here in the last two decades, according to data provided by the local divisional collectorate.

But these trucks haven’t been carrying any relief for distressed farmers. Instead, with a photo of the Hindu god Ram on posters stuck on their sides, the trucks have been foraying deep inside the district, exhorting farmers to donate grains.

The grains are headed to Ayodhya to feed hundreds of thousands of devotees visiting the city where Prime Minister Narendra Modi will consecrate a temple to Ram on January 22, over three decades after a mob led by Hindu nationalists tore down a mosque that stood on the spot.

The trucks are being operated by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a part of the Hindu nationalist network Sangh Parivar led by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) that includes Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

At Yavatmal’s Samvidhan Chowk, workers hurriedly load a large container truck with sacks of grains. “We have managed to fill three container trucks with these donations, and this is the fourth one,” says VHP Vidarbha Prant President Raju Niwal. The idea, VHP volunteers on the spot say, is to mobilise farmers and make them “feel involved” in the celebrations.

It’s a sentiment that the Modi government and its ideological allies