Why the BJP is deifying Maharashtra's great women achievers

The renaming of Ahmednagar as Ahilyanagar by the Eknath Shinde government has done little to appease the OBCs in Maharashtra. Constituting 40 per cent of the state’s population, they are now vigorously opposing a proposal by the government to put up a temple and install Ahilyabai Holkar as a deity.

The state’s OBC activists and ideologues smell a ‘Brahminical conspiracy’ in the proposal. They have also objected to the naming of the ‘Sadhvi’ Savitribai Phule park in Pune. While the park dates back to 1995, the ideologues argue that the term ‘sadhvi’ has, since then, acquired sinister overtones.

One cannot hear or use it without recalling the likes of Malegaon blast accused BJP MP Sadhvi Pragya, and hatemongering ‘sadhvis’ like Prachi and Ritambhara, associated with various RSS affiliates. Certainly, these associations would be felt as uncomfortable beyond the OBC community as well—indeed, by many Hindus who are not adherents of the Hindutva ideology.

To call Savitribai Phule a ‘sadhvi’ and recast Ahilyabai Holkar as a Hindu deity insults and undermines their very real achievements as educators, social reformers, environmentalists and rulers.

The controversy, raging on Marathi social media, has sharpened the divide in the state and embarrassed political parties. The BJP, thus far known as a party of ‘Shetjis’ and ‘Bhatjis’ (traders and Brahmins), is credited with forging a social alliance in the state known as ‘Madhav’ (an acronym for Mali–Dhangar–Vanjari) to counter the Marathas.

It also wooed the Marathas by offering them reservation. A Brahmin–Maratha rift in the state would therefore be politically fatal not just for the BJP but also the other parties.

One can see why NCP leader Chhagan Bhujbal is already demanding that the leader of the opposition in the assembly (currently Ajit Pawar) should be from the OBCs if the party president is from the Marathas (who constitute 33 per cent of the population).

The BJP, with Devendra Fadnavis, a Brahmin, at the helm of the party in Maharashtra, does not have an equally popular OBC leader after the death of Gopinath Munde in a road accident eight years ago.

Not surprisingly, the current controversy has opened up old wounds. OBC activists recall the salacious references to Savitribai Phule by former governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari. Addressing a public event, Koshyari had referred to Savitribai’s marriage at the age of nine to a groom aged 13, and wondered about their conjugal life.

The BJP fan club attending the event had laughed uproariously. A distinctly unfunny incident that OBC activists look back on with anger, seeing it as part of the deliberate targeting of women by the Brahminical upper class and RSS to reduce their importance and contributions to the community.

While Savitribai hailed from the Mali community, Ahilyabai’s family was from the Dhangar caste, elevated by the Peshwas to rule Malwa in their name.

“In today’s India, there is a trend of entrapping achievers from other communities in a Brahminical narrative,” says Dr Raosaheb Kasbe, leading Marathi writer and thinker. “There are many ways of doing this but they are particularly ingenuous when it comes to women.”

The simplest of these means is to deify the women. “Turn them into a goddess and lodge them in temples. They instantly cease to be human achievers. Soon their accomplishments will be in the realm of the divine and no one will emulate them any longer,” he adds.

On 4 January, 2022, IndicTales.com, a portal ostensibly dedicated to Indian history and civilisation, carried an article with the headline, ‘Why Hindu female teachers before Savitribai Phule are not recognised’.

Coinciding with Phule’s 191st birth anniversary, the article insinuated that the British had accorded her more importance (than she deserved) because her school gave them access to ‘beautiful young girls’ being recruited for ‘British military harems’.

By the middle of 2023, the article caught enough eyeballs to cause widespread outrage. A police complaint was filed and OBC leaders like Chhagan Bhujbal and others demanded action against both IndicTales and HinduPost, another portal which had denigrated Savitribai. The chief minister was compelled to issue an order that the websites be taken down pending investigation.

Around the time these articles were spotted this year, Rohit Pawar, a great-nephew of Sharad Pawar, flagged the removal of the statues of Savitribai and Ahilyabai from Maharashtra Sadan in New Delhi to make way for a portrait of V.D. Savarkar.

Bhujbal, who as minister had cleared the guesthouse construction and had spent two years in jail following allegations of financial irregularity before he was acquitted, wondered why this was deemed necessary.

Both the busts were on either side of a stairway and could not have obstructed the portrait of Savarkar.

The outrage did not come as a surprise. These were women who believed in human action rather than divine intervention.

While Savitribai and Fatima Sheikh are rightfully hailed as pioneers of women’s education in India, Ahilyabai, queen of Malwa and ruler of Indore was known as a social reformer of her time. Nehru, in The Discovery of India, described her reign as ‘almost legendary… a period during which perfect order and good government prevailed and the people prospered’.

She captained an army and encouraged women to believe that they were in no way second to men. She built dams and stepwells and roads lined with trees. As Kasbe says, “She was a visionary, not a goddess. She should be revered as such, not consecrated in a temple.”

Savitribai Phule, too, was no goddess, argues Pune lawyer Asim Sarode. She had to put up with considerable humiliation in her early days as India’s first woman teacher. Brahmins pelted her with stones, cow dung and mud on her way to school. She had to carry a spare sari in her bag so that she could change into clean clothes before engaging with students from deprived classes who were denied their right to education by upper castes.

Call her a revolutionary, Sarode says, or an enlightened one, but not a ‘sadhvi’ for God’s sake.