There is a new undercurrent in the Yamuna this Chhath. The intensity of its ripples is not being dictated by the gatekeepers of the Hathni Kund barrage any more. Instead, the slow, meandering river has become the focus of excessive attention of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in Delhi. From Chief Minister Rekha Gupta downwards—or, one can say, upwards as well, including the office of the Delhi lieutenant governor—at least one political member of the government is dispatched to the non-descript ghats of the Yamuna every day to supervise the preparations for the Chhath festival, which started on Saturday.
The flurry of activities in the river and its ghats—be they development of new ghats, landscaping, road surfacing, smart lighting, or cultural activities—have a political dimension to them which the city has not witnessed before. That the Chhath is about Bihar and Bihari women is not lost on the politician. That cultural resurgence is translatable into votes in distant lands is an innovation of the politician.
Innovation after hiatus The capital has changed since 1998, when the BJP last governed it before registering a thumping win in the Assembly election earlier this year. It took the BJP 26 long years to understand the changing demographics of the city, which the dominant figures of the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Sheila Dikshit and Arvind Kejriwal, respectively, grasped much before the BJP could.
Over the years, Purvanchalis have consolidated as a geographical and cultural voting bloc in many constituencies of east Delhi, whose political currency is coveted by competing political interests. “In 2013, 2015, and 2020 assembly elections, this bloc voted for AAP. However, in the 2025 election, it has shifted towards the BJP, facilitating the defeat of many AAP candidates,” says Neeraj Singh, a Purvanchali, who is associated with the BJP and now settled in Delhi.
This shift is neither accidental nor complete. There was a time when the BJP’s Delhi unit was seen as a Punjabi-bania party, whose influence centred around Punjabi-dominated neighbourhoods and traders’ strongholds. With time, it started adding landowning Jaat and Gujjar communities living around the circumference of the city. Despite its best efforts, the BJP could not breach the 40% mark in vote share in successive assembly elections, which was not adequate to propel it to power in a city dominated by two parties.
However, under the national leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, who continues to dominate party affairs despite not being part of the organisational structure any more, the BJP has been on a mission mode to add more communities to its support base across states. Delhi was no exception to this proposition, especially when it was clearly visible election after election that the party’s support base among traditional voting blocs had stagnated.
The BJP now wants to consolidate the inroads it has made into the Purvanchali voting bloc, an exercise that, one can say, started with the elevation of popular Bhojpuri singer and actor Manoj Tiwari as the president of the party’s Delhi unit in 2016. In fact, nothing explains the approach of the BJP leadership vis-a-vis Purvanchalis than the continued relevance of Tiwari in Delhi politics, despite he not delivering as the state unit president.
Yamuna symbolism
Unlike Tiwari, who is placed as a politico-cultural icon in the psyche of Purvanchali voters in general, but Bihari voters specifically, in Delhi as sound political strategy, the Yamuna has become an incidental metaphor for the Purvanchali/Bihari voting bloc. For cultural and economic reason, Purvanchalis have come to dominate the Assembly landscape in east Delhi constituencies, which are located close to the river.
BJP strategists are constantly on the lookout for symbolism for cultural revivalism. The Chhath fits perfectly into this scheme, because it does not lend itself to the derision of the BJP’s critics who see social aggression in its revivalist politics. When Delhi BJP spokesperson Praveen Shankar Kapoor says “Our governments in the Centre and various states promote and celebrate every festival with equal respect”, he knows this statement fits well in the case of the Chhath.
The Gupta government formed a five-member panel on October 13 with Culture and Tourism Minister Kapil Mishra as its chair to oversee the preparations for the Chhath in the capital and select venues on the banks of the river. Gupta and every member of her cabinet have been on the Yamuna banks every day since then, using the visits as stock-taking exercises and photo-ops.
Gupta’s government has already announced, and acted upon, unprecedented arrangements for the Chhath, including constructing more ghats, turning large ghats into model ghats, installing smart lighting, running sanitation drives, and organising free transport for devotees. Most importantly, deviating from the convention and irking environmentalists, her government has decided to allow the rituals to take place in the Yamuna waters, rather than following the earlier practice of the Kejriwal government of creating artificial ponds around the banks.
The Delhi government will prefer to top its efforts with a visit by Modi to one of the ghats that can complete the political messaging and make Delhi’s Chhath arrangements an interstate issue. By Sunday evening, there was buzz in the capital’s political circles that Modi would visit the Vasudev Ghat in the Kashmiri Gate area on Tuesday and offer prayer to the rising sun.
That the political messaging of the massive Chhath preparations by the Gupta government is intended at the Bihar Assembly election has not been lost on the BJP’s opponents. Its Delhi president Saurabh Bhardwaj, who has been finding holes in the BJP’s claims of making the Yamuna clean for the Chhath, says, “The BJP’s grand show around the Chhath Puja and the Yamuna cleaning are election stunts ahead of the Bihar Assembly poll. The BJP’s sudden devotion is driven by the fear of losing votes, as Arvind Kejriwal has set a benchmark they cannot ignore.”
Estimates suggest aht Purvanchalis account for around 25-30% of Delhi’s electorate and have decisive say in the outcome of 14 to 18 assembly seats. However, with the Delhi Assembly conquered, the BJP is eyeing their network in Bihar that can influence the electoral outcome in many constituencies in Bihar through the creation of a cultural network of solidarity. “The BJP is connecting the Chhath with cleaning of environment and civic planning. In the process, it is elevating a regional festival to a national status, giving the otherwise stigmatised Bihari identity a new dignity and recognition. It shifts the focus from social and economic demands to cultural and psychological empowerment,” says Ajay Gudavarthy, a political theorist at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
It is not a coincidence, then, that the central leadership of the party has deputed important leaders from the city, including Gupta and her cabinet, for election duty in Bihar. Gupta has already participated in in a public meeting for Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Vijay Kumar Sinha, who is contesting from Lakhi Sarai. She also participated in public meeting in Bihar Sharif for BJP candidate Sunil Kumar.
Among her cabinet colleagues, Pankaj Singh, her Health Minister, who hails from Buxar, reached Bihar a couple of weeks ago, while Power Minister Ashish Sood is scheduled to visit the state after the Chhath festivities get over. He has been assigned the Siwan region for campaigning. Similarly, Kapil Mishra has been assigned the Shahabad and Ara regions.
Women as devotees and voters
Women are the primary actors of the Chhath festival, and, increasingly, they are gaining importance as a voting bloc in Bihar. The Chhath imagery mostly shows women offering water to the sun god. That is a target group that is high on the BJP’s agenda in Bihar.
Pramila Sharma is a 52-year-old migrant from Badarpur, who used to go to the Kalindi Kunj ghat for the Chhath. She says, “Though the Chhath Puja is performed at a river bank, the inaccessibility and pollution of the Yamuna have forced us to circumvent the tradition. This year, the ritual is allowed inside the river, but I don’t feel safe to go there,” she said.
Then there is Usha Kiran Shrivastava, a devotee living in Bihar’s West Champaran district, who has observed the festival both at her native place as well at her brother’s house in Shahadra. She says, “I am happy that the Delhi government is developing model ghats and devotees can go inside the river.”
These are the two sets of women devotees that the BJP is appealing to through its scaled-up efforts of the Chhath arrangements in Delhi, and the coincidence that these efforts are being led by Rekha Gupta complete the triangularity of the feminine appeal that works well for the BJP in Bihar. What is not a coincidence, however, is the direct tapping of the women as a voting bloc by the BJP in Bihar, which is best exemplified in its decision, through the office of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, to transfer Rs 10,000 into the bank accounts of Bihar’s women under the Mukhyamantri Mahila Rozgar Yojana.
The slow currents of the Yamuna take between two to three weeks to reach Patna after it merges with the Ganga in Prayagraj. Over two weeks is also the time between the start of the Chhath when Purvanchali women in Delhi take the first dip in the Yamuna on October 27 and when the second phase of the Bihar election end on November 11. As the wavy currents of the Yamuna ripple between two capitals for over 1,700 kilometres in this period, the BJP’s fortune may traverse an undulating journey of equal wavelengths and distance as well.
