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VARANASI, India – As he introduced himself, Prime Minister Narendra Modi traveled to this city with narrow streets and innumerable temples in a Ganga curve and declared that he was doing the work of God.
Modi inaugurated in March a project that will radically transform the heart of Varanasi, the holiest city of Hinduism, by cutting a wide path leading from its most important temple to the river.
"It seems that God has chosen me" for this task, said Modi, who represents the city in the Indian Parliament. "It's a sacred work on Earth."
On Thursday, Modi and his party Bharatiya Janata won a landslide victory at the six-week election in India, with a powerful call for nationalism and Hindu pride.
The victory of Modi is a triumph for the ideology it represents, which some critics say crying against the fabric of a country that includes many religions, languages and cultures.
For Modi and his party, India is fundamentally a Hindu nation, where the priorities of the majority take precedence and the laïcité advocated by the founders of the country has no place.
Few things illustrate Modi's ambitions for this nation of more than 1.3 billion people better than the temple corridor initiative. Often nicknamed his "dream project", he combines devotion to Hinduism and modern infrastructure in a centerpiece designed to strengthen the stature of the country in the eyes of the world.
For his supporters, Modi is at his best. They see him as a bold and visionary leader who gives priority to Hindu traditions and seeks to demonstrate India's rising power status, whether by building the world's highest statue, sending a probe to land on the ground. Moon or by creating a train-ballier route.
A worker demolishes a residential building to make way for the corridor of Kashi Vishwanath temple in Varanasi. (Rajesh Kumar Singh / AP)
But for his detractors, the project is proof that he is a divider who harms Indian pluralism with shrill badertions of Hindu identity. They say it's the job of a dictatorial leader who is above all loyal and will not admit it when he does not achieve his bold goals.
[Analysis: India’s Modi has been a bellwether for global populism]
The spiritual life of Varanasi is centered on the Ganges, where every day many pilgrims descend the stone steps – called "ghats" – to wash their sins in their holy waters. It is a place where Hindus believe that they reach the "moksha" – salvation – if they are cremated here at their death.
Most of the works near the river – very compact lanes dotted with temples and historic mansions on the water's edge – date back to the 18th century. But the city, also called Kashi, has been inhabited continuously for thousands of years.
Until recently, the Kashi Vishwanath temple – the most famous temple in the city, dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva – was entangled in the old city. Tens of thousands of pilgrims crisscrossed narrow streets every day to reach it.
Now, the Modi government has embarked on a dramatic transformation of the region this includes the demolition of nearly 300 buildings to redevelop a 12-acre site linking the temple to the river, located a quarter of a mile away. It is an effort similar to the destruction of nine football fields in the Old City of Jerusalem. The corridor will include a large square, arcades, a museum and amenities such as public lockers and toilets.
The project is "very close to [Modi’s] heart "and will be" a very important step in Kashi's development, "said Vishal Singh, secretary of the Varanasi Development Authority, which oversees the $ 75 million project. There are those who are "open-minded and want the place to be better, then those who just want things to stay the way they are".
Opponents of the corridor say they are opposed to change, but only to the extreme nature of the renovation and lack of information from the community.
[U.S.-style political polarization has arrived in India. Modi is at the center.]
Some say the roads could have been widened and rehabilitated rather than razed. Instead, the authorities started buying houses and demolishing them last year. Even now, there is no plan available for the project. The first announcement of what the corridor would look like came in a simulation tweeted by Modi two months ago.
Opponents of the project often note with bitterness that Modi had promised to make Varanasi a place that would look more like Kyoto, Japan, also a city of sacred temples on a river.
"They saved their culture," said Sanjeev Ratna Mishra, whose store was demolished to make way for the corridor. "Here we threw it in the mud."
Swami Avimukteshwaranand, who heads Vidya Math, a Hindu religious institution in Varanasi, said several groups of people came to tell him that temples and religious idols had been destroyed during the demolition process. When he went to see for himself in April 2018, he was shocked to find broken idols scattered on the site. He bowed to the debris and asked for forgiveness.
"In our history, many times, kings thought that they were divine," he said. "Modi thinks he's a god."
The Vishwanath Corridor Project in Varanasi is transforming the heart of the holiest city in India. Here, two Hindu temples are preserved in the midst of demolished buildings. (Joanna Slater / The Washington Post)
Singh, the project supervisor, denied that temples were demolished and said that those found would be preserved. Two temples previously installed in the basements of private houses were buried, he added, but the authorities intend to build new temples above ground.
The corridor is also of concern to the large Muslim community in Varanasi, which represents about 29% of the city's population. The temple of Vishwanath, with its spire and its golden domes, adjoins the bulbous domes of the Gyanvapi mosque. Right-wing Hindu activists have long expressed the wish to demolish the mosque, just as they destroyed a 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya in 1992.
Avimukteshwaranand said that several of these activists had urged him to support the corridor project, believing that the cleared space would facilitate the damage done to the mosque by a large group. He refused.
The mosque is surrounded by a high security fence, but many Muslims are still worried.
"The future is very dark," said S.M. Yasin, 71, senior body official who oversees the Gyanvapi mosque. The building, he said, "can be damaged at any time".
Those involved in the construction of the corridor said that the corridor included several levels of security for the mosque and would bring much-needed improvements to the area. Bimal Patel of HCP, the Ahmedabad-based firm that designed the corridor, is going to "generate dissatisfaction". But it is important, he said, "to have the courage to do what needs to be done – for me, that's what the Prime Minister says."
During Modi's first tenure, he brought new infrastructure to Varanasi, a busy city with more than 1.2 million people. A new smooth four-lane highway connects the airport to downtown and the authorities are using it to install tangled overhead power cables into the ground.
But his promise to clean the Ganges failed. Vishwambhar Nath Mishra, an engineering professor and religious leader in Varanasi, who runs a foundation that monitors the river, said the water quality has not improved since Modi's tenure.
Meanwhile, with the temple corridor project, Modi undermines Varanasi's "living heritage," said Mishra, a town known for its winding alleys leading to the wide Ganges. "He's trying to change the DNA of this place."
Utpal Pathak contributed to this report.
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