The battle for Kedarnath

The Bharatiya Janata Party is leaving nothing to chance. Having lost the Badrinath assembly seat in a by-election in 2022 and the Ayodhya Lok Sabha seat in the 2024 general election, it cannot afford to lose yet another holy site for devout Hindus.

Little wonder then that chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami is personally overseeing the BJP’s campaign in the temple town. He even accompanied BJP candidate Asha Nautiyal when she filed her nomination.

Recent electoral history favours the BJP. Four of the five previous elections in the last two decades have gone in favour of women candidates. Female voters (45,775) outnumber male voters (44,765) in this constituency. Not only are they as vocal, if not more, than the men, this year’s contest between the BJP’s Nautiyal and the Congress’ Manoj Rawat is also likely to be determined by women. Rawat, a Rajput, and Nautiyal, a Brahmin, are both former MLAs from the constituency.

A paucity of job opportunities and the migration of men in search of work to the plains continue to be electoral issues in the Kedarnath assembly segment which includes Rudraprayag, Didihat, Pithoragarh and Dwarhat. The crucial by-election this month was necessitated by the death of BJP MLA Shaila Rani Rawat.

Asha Nautiyal had won this seat in 2002 and 2007 while Manoj Rawat won from here in 2017. Ironically, Rawat’s victory was, in some measure, due to Nautiyal who contested as an independent, having been denied the BJP ticket in 2017. She cornered a large number of votes for herself, trumping her arch rival Shaila Rani Rawat, and ensuring Manoj Rawat’s victory. While a chastened BJP has fallen back on Asha Nautiyal again, Rawat is seeking votes on the strength of his work as a legislator.

Kedarnath is a biggie for the BJP also because of prime minister Narendra Modi’s all-out ‘devotion’ to the place. Since assuming office in 2014, the PM has made eight trips to Kedarnath. Who can forget the sight of him clad in saffron, playing at 24-hour meditation in a cave in Kedarnath in 2019, in the full glare of TV crews and cameras. Or his unveiling of the 12-foot statue of 8th-century seer Adi Shankaracharya at Kedarnath in 2021.

Our indefatigable prime minister is also known to be the driving force behind the gold plating of the sanctum sanctorum of the temple. It is a different matter that 228 kg of gold was donated and only 23 kg used. Who stole the rest? No one knows.

His personal zeal to ‘develop’ Kedarnath has made the Char Dham Yatra the high-fliers’ delight. The rich jet in to Dehradun and then copter it to Kedarnath temple. For the less well-heeled, existing motorable roads have been widened. Hotels have mushroomed around Kedarnath. The PM has personally supervised the construction of a theatre, a pilgrim’s ghat and a hospital, ignoring the warning of geologists that such construction was unsuitable for a temple town on a glacial moraine susceptible to land subsidence.

The ancient Shiva temple at Kedarnath in the Garhwal Himalayas is cradled by the Mandakini river. Over the last five years, this sacred space — with the snow-clad mountains providing a stunningly beautiful backdrop — has been converted into a shanty town. What was once a green meadow has been taken over by makeshift jhuggis with blue tarpaulin roofs that provide cheap accommodation to the thousands of Char Dham yatris during the summer months.

The jhuggis are in sharp contrast to the umpteen multi-storey hotels and arcades being constructed to provide accommodation for those tourists who can afford them.

The Kedar Valley has undergone several devastating landslides and floods, the most disastrous in 2013. On 31 July, the Valley once again witnessed unprecedented rainfall and landslides. Curiously, there are no official figures yet of the number of pilgrims present at Kedarnath on that day. With pilgrim registration mandatory at all four Dhams (Kedarnath, Badrinath, Gangotri and Yamunotri) surely the state government should have had those figures at their fingertips?

But no. No figures on the number of pilgrims who died. On 1 August, the Rudraprayag district magistrate Saurabh Gaharwar claimed on X that about 200–300 people were present at Kedarnath Dham. Mysteriously, by the evening of 2 August, this figure had crossed 7,000. On 3 August, 1,865 pilgrims were said to have been rescued and taken to safe places, bringing the total number of people rescued to a total of 9,099. By 4 August, officials claimed that a total of 10,374 persons had been rescued.

A local from Gaurikund recalled, “We were reminded of the Kedarnath disaster of 2013. It was raining heavily uphill in Kedarnath region when the water in the river started rising. We felt a vibration. Before we could understand what was going on, a lot of water came rushing downwards. We all ran outside to a safe place to save our lives but many people got washed away. The road was washed away at the same place during the 2013 tragedy. When the rain waters receded, many people came to my place to enquire about their loved ones.”

Activist Atul Sati points out, “Although the BJP claims the yatra has been a great success, they had to stop it on three occasions because of incessant landslides.” So why did they not stop it on that terrible day in July?

That’s the question that’s still haunting the local people. Why was the yatra allowed to continue despite the Met department having issued repeated warnings about inclement weather? Leading scientist Ravi Chopra echoes this sentiment when he asks, “Why was the movement of pilgrims not stopped when there was an alert for heavy rains?”

Congress candidate Manoj Rawat’s campaign has centred around the gross negligence and lack of empathy and concern for the safety of the Char Dham yatris. Most people suspect the actual number of deaths was suppressed.

The rising incidence of landslides in the Garhwal Himalayas and the steady depletion of agricultural land to forest fires — which have reached the upper regions of the Himalayas — is a matter of concern for the local population. Rawat said, “The weather in these parts has become cold. Kedarji’s doors closed on 3 November at 8.30 a.m. and will remain shut for the next six months. The by-election will take place in these cold conditions and we are trying our best to campaign and take the issues to the people.” One of those issues is the theft of the gold claimed to be worth several thousand crores.

While the Congress has been focusing on the lack of any real development in the area, the BJP has been countering local resentment by diverting attention from the government’s shortcomings in its usual way — by steadily whipping up anti-Muslim frenzy across the entire Garhwal region. With Muslims comprising a mere two per cent of the population, raising non-issues of ‘love jihad’, ‘mazaar jihad’ and ‘naukri jihad’ is clearly the saffron party’s pathetic default setting when it finds its own house in disorder.