Every strongman needs to mark his time upon history and a monument to his everlasting relevance. Francisco Franco has his Valle de los Caídos (the Valley of the Fallen) just outside Madrid, where his remains are buried. Kim Il-Sung has his enormous Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, incomplete for 36 years despite a funding of $750 million. Josip Broz Tito had his hedonistic, ostrich-filled island of Brioni in the Adriatic.
Saddam Hussein sought to rebuild Babylon in Hillah, south of Baghdad, with yellow bricks with his name inscribed on them. Stalin’s memory is encased in the Seven Sisters in Moscow. Mao Zedong gave the name to the Great Hall of the People, situated near the iconic Tiananmen Square. And Hitler has his Zeppelin Field in Nuremberg, from the grandstand of which he delivered his demagoguery.
Some of these monuments exist as records of ill times, some are undergoing a process of slow, permitted deterioration and some remain celebrated. Some are still being built.
The vast Nazi party rally grounds in Nuremberg, had no purpose other than to commemorate Hitler. Up to 1 million Germans trooped in—initially muscled but later, as the indoctrination intensified, of their own volition—to attend each of the six National Socialist party congresses held there.
The History of Bavaria website explains the purpose. “The Nazi party rallies served solely for the internal and external self-representation of the Nazi state. They had no programmatic task whatsoever. The staging of ‘national community’ and ‘leader myth’ was intended to demonstrate the unity of the nation… Politics should not be discussed or understood here, but rather ‘experienced’. The staging became the important political message.”
Nuremberg was meant to be a “temple city of the movement”, as its designer Albert Speer put it. “Perpetuity and monumentality”, said the website of the Museums of the City of Nuremberg, were the “architectural principles of the National Socialist state and party”.
If you’re wondering where I’m going with this, let me refer you to the phrase “temple city of the movement”. And how the metaphor of Nuremberg fits the city of Ayodhya, and how the Ram mandir refers the mind back to Nuremberg. Just as flambeaux were brought ceremonially lit to the Nuremberg rallies from all over Deutschland, the Ram Mandir has become the repository of gifts—some of them devotionally outlandish—from votive holdfasts located far from Ayodhya.
Among them: from Nepal, 3,000 gifts ranging from cash, clothing, fruits and candies to gold and silver; from Lucknow, a round-faced global clock able to simultaneously display the time in nine countries; a Ram Lalla with a bow and arrow made of gold from Patna; from Vadodara, a 1,100-kg brass-and-copper lamp standing 9 ft tall and capable of holding 850 kg of ghee; a pair of gold padukas weighing 9 kg from Hyderabad; from Nagpur, 7,000 kg of halwa; the world’s largest lock-and-key weighing 400 kg and 10 ft tall, from Aligarh; a bell weighing 2,100 kg made of ashtadhatu (an alloy of eight metals) from Etah; puja items of pure silver from Chennai; from Surat, a silver Ram temple necklace weighing 2 kg and embedded with 5,000 American diamonds; a 4’7” nagaru, a hemispherical drum, wrapped in gold foil from Dariyapur; and from Ahmedabad, a 3,610 kg, 108-ft incense stick nearly half the height of the Qutb Minar.
That one man, PM Modi, has galvanised an indescribably diverse Hindu community to outpour collectively just goes to show the demonstrability of the machinational playbook he is working from as well as the readiness of many Hindus today to be moulded.
Nuremberg was designed to be a “community of the people” (Volksgemeinschaft). At Ayodhya, the people (aam janta) will together answer to one leader—whom, as in Germany nearly a century ago, they are already in thrall of.
There are other parallels, too. The Ram mandir, although only semi-finished, is being bedecked to be consecrated—but its incompletion is undetectable from the photographs released in the Indian media. This is reminiscent of the propaganda pictures of Nuremberg released publicly, which never ever hinted at the fact that it was one gargantuan construction site (the workings of which came to a precipitous, incomplete halt when Germany went to war in 1939).
Many seers, including the four shankaracharyas, are complaining that cutting the ribbon of an unfinished house of worship is a defiance of tradition and an invitation to disaster and have refused to attend. For the first time, a thick line has been drawn, perhaps unintendedly, between political Hindutva and religious Hinduism, but few expect these objections to pass unanswered by duress. This echoes the murmuration of disenchantment from some Nazi quarters that preceded the first Nuremberg rally in 1933, which were first disdained and then strong-armed into silence and finally co-opted.
Meanwhile, both luminaries' actions are a study in the manipulation of faith’s praxis. Having decided to lead the consecration, Modi built up tempo and cachet by releasing photos of himself schmoozing with holy cows at his residence and absorbedly singing bhajans at a temple. In The Language of the Third Reich, Victor Klemperer, a German Jewish philologist, wrote perplexedly of the quasi-religious ardency with which many Germans treated Hitler, and which Hitler actively cultivated.
Both political godmen, the same fit cut from the same cloth. The temple is Modi’s Nuremberg, a chance at the eternalisation of his name.
(Views are personal)
(kajalrbasu@gmail.com)
Kajal Basu, Veteran journalist