Two ideas of faith, a party's two faces

When a Purity Code Meets a Region That Never Needed One In 1897, Swami

Vivekananda stood before an audience and reminded them that his teacher, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, had spent years moving between Vaishnava, Shakta, Islamic and Christian devotional practice before arriving at a single conviction: joto mot, toto poth - as many faiths, so many paths.

That conviction was not an abstract theology. It was built from the same religious soil that, more than a century later, has just embarrassed a sitting chief minister on camera. Dhirendra Krishna Shastri's call for Bengali Hindus to abstain from meat and fish during Durga Puja was, in most of India, an unremarkable statement - dietary purity around Navratri is now familiar shorthand for devotion in the Hindi belt.

But Bengal's Shakta tradition was never built on that grammar. Durga and Kali are both forms of Shakti and Shakta worship has for generations treated meat, fish and even animal sacrifice on Ashtami not as a lapse from purity but as one legitimate route to the goddess among several.

The bhog queues and the fish-stall queues outside the same pandal are not a contradiction in Bengal's religious life - they are the tradition working as designed. What makes this story worth more than a controversy log is what happened next.

West Bengal BJP president Samik Bhattacharya distanced the party from Shastri's remarks. Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari then did something no amount of press messaging could have staged as convincingly: he ate fish and basanti pulao on camera at the Kalighat temple bhog, even as the VHP was issuing guidelines asking puja organisers to keep non-vegetarian stalls away from pandals.

Within the same week, one wing of the ruling coalition was enforcing a purity code and another wing was its most visible violator. This is not confusion. It is the cost of governing Bengal after winning it. For a decade, the BJP fought the bohiragato - outsider - charge, built by the Trinamool's "Bengali asmita" campaign, which painted the party as a Hindi-belt import indifferent to Bengali life.

The party's 2026 victory required shedding that label and its campaign leaned hard on visuals of its leaders eating fish and speaking fluently in Bengali cultural terms. A vegetarian-purity code that plays well as content for a north Indian godman's audience is precisely the code a Bengal government must now be seen breaching, to prove it belongs to the state it runs.

What looks like the BJP's messaging failing on contact with Bengal is really two tracks of the same movement running side by side - a portable orthodoxy for national branding and a vernacular, accommodative face for the region it has to govern.

Durga Puja itself is the clearest evidence that this accommodation is not new. The festival has never worked by enforcing sameness - the pandal is at once a shrine, an art installation and a public square and the crowd inside it comes for the pushpanjali, for the food or simply because this is when Bengal gathers.

Where the parallel to a "national religious identity" breaks down is exactly here: Bengal's Durga Puja was built to hold difference, not erase it and no dietary directive issued from outside the state has ever had to be obeyed for the festival to remain devout.

For the exam, this is the real lesson - Indian society's diversity is not a problem religion occasionally has to manage; in Bengal's case, it is the very mechanism that has kept the tradition alive.