Ahead of Durga Puja, two ideas of faith, a party’s two faces

From the Opinions Editor: Ahead of Durga Puja, two ideas of faith, a party's two faces Within a single week, in West Bengal, the ruling party and its affiliates came to be the proponent of a purity campaign and its most conspicuous violator.

Key points

• 5 min readSep 13, 2026 09: 38 PM IST First published on: Sep 13, 2026 at 08: 55 PM IST.
• Sayu Bhojwani writes: From 9/11 to Zohran Mamdani: From the ashes, a new South Asian political compact. © The Indian Express Pvt Ltd.
• Kaushik Das Gupta writes: What has created Delhi so indifferent to the humanity of Dilliwallahs?
• In much of India, vegetarianism, especially around Navratri or Sawan, has become a litmus test of devotion.
• The Durga Puja celebration in the state offers a way to understand this.

Meanwhile, the pandal is simultaneously a sacred space, a work of art and a session place. Thousands participate in its rituals; plenty of others partake of its atmosphere, its aesthetics and its communal life. (File Photo). Written by: Paromita Chakrabarti.

Ahead of Durga Puja, Dhirendra Krishna Shastri, the godman who runs Bageshwar Dham, has raked up a controversy by calling on Bengali Hindus to abstain from eating non-vegetarian food during the festival, branding those who do as "pakhandis". In much of India, vegetarianism, especially around Navratri or Sawan, has become a litmus test of devotion. But in West Bengal, the line between a bhakta (true devotee) and a bhanda (hypocrite) has never rested on dietary choices.

Meanwhile, the community pujos create this clear – the queues for the bhog (the offering to the goddess) are matched by those outside the plentiful non-vegetarian food stalls that dot the perimeter of the pujo pandals. The Shakta tradition in Bengal – the worship of Shakti, the divine feminine to which both Durga and Kali belong – has historically accommodated meat, fish and animal sacrifice. Vegetarianism happens to be one of the plenty of paths to the goddess, not a necessary precondition.

What Shastri's remark brings into focus, then, are two particularly different ideas of what religious faith should look like. One treats food and abstinence as markers of purity. The other sees faith as something that can accommodate different practices and forms of devotion. Interestingly, his remark was followed by a revealing sequence of responses. BJP state president Samik Bhattacharya distanced the party from it. Chief minister Suvendu Adhikari partook in the bhog at the Kalighat temple, eating fish and basanti pulao on camera, even as the VHP issued "guidelines" for Durga Puja organisers to keep the sale and consumption of non-vegetarian food away from pandals to preserve the festival's "sanctity". A Congress leader who had filed a police complaint against Shastri over his remarks was arrested in Kolkata. Within a single week, the ruling party and its affiliates came to be the proponent of a purity campaign and its most conspicuous violator.

This apparent anomaly can be understood when placed in context of the BJP's victory in the state in May this year. For a decade, the party had fought the "outsider" charge in Bengal – the Trinamool Congress's "Bengali asmita" campaign. It painted the BJP as a Hindi-belt import – bohiragato – with no understanding of what being Bengali entailed. The party's 2026 victory required it to shed that label, and in the run-up to the elections, its campaign focused on leaders eating fish and assuring the electorate that it was attuned to its diet and culture. And so, ahead of the state's biggest festival, the vegetarian-purity code that plays as content for a north Indian godman's YouTube audience is one a state administration must publicly breach to prove it belongs to the region it now governs. What looks like the party's own moral messaging failing when it comes in contact with Bengal is two tracks of the same movement: A portable, telegenic orthodoxy for national branding, and a vernacular, accommodative face in the state.

Behind the electoral calculus, nevertheless, what remains is a simpler truth concerning how individuals practise faith: What Vivekananda's teacher, the Bengali mystic Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, called nana mat, nana path – as numerous faiths, so plenty of paths.

Notably, the Durga Puja celebration in the state offers a way to understand this. It has always been less regarding enforcing sameness than concerning making room – for different rituals, different forms of devotion, and even different reasons for showing up. It has allowed the religious tradition to remain alive by placing it within a larger shared world, where participation does not need a rigid checklist of dos and don'ts. The pandal is simultaneously a sacred space, a work of art and a session place. Thousands participate in its rituals; plenty of others partake of its atmosphere, its aesthetics and its communal life. Some come for the pushpanjali, some for the food stalls, and some simply since this is when Bengal comes together. The festival's rare quality is its capacity to accommodate different degrees and forms of participation.

That may be the essence of the state's sharodotshob – not that everyone worships in the same way, but that, for a few days every autumn, multitudes can find themselves as part of the same celebration.

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Sayu Bhojwani writes: From 9/11 to Zohran Mamdani: From the ashes, a new South Asian political compact. © The Indian Express Pvt Ltd. Paromita Chakrabarti is Senior Associate Editor at the The Indian.

For now, ahead of Durga Puja, two ideas of faith, a party's two faces remains the part of the story worth watching, and further updates are likely as more details are confirmed.