DARK SECRETS: The batadrava bjp connect in assam | Rare Historical Photos

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi probably had a feeling of déjà vu when he was not allowed to enter Batadrava Than, the birthplace of Assam’s most revered spiritual icon, on January 22, around the time Prime Minister Narendra Modi led the ‘Pran Pratishtha’ ceremony for the Ram Temple in Ayodhya. In December 2015, he was allegedly turned away from western Assam’s Barpeta Satra on a day he launched the Congress campaign for the 2016 Assembly elections. A few weeks later, former Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal, now a Union Minister, launched his election campaign for the Bharatiya Janata Party from the Uttar Kamalabari Satra in Majuli, an island-like landmass in the Brahmaputra River about 430 km east of Barpeta Satra.

There are an estimated 900 satras — monasteries of the neo-Vaishnav order — across Assam and beyond. Barpeta and Uttar Kamalabari are two of the foremost among them but they are not on the same level of spirituality or reverence as the Batadrava Than located roughly at the midpoint in the Nagaon district. A ‘than’ is more than just a monastery that has a four-tier structure with a prayer hall at its centre. And Batadrava, also spelled Bordowa, has been more than just an exalted place of worship for the adherents of the Ekasarana Dharma, a neo-Vaishnav monolithic form of spiritualism propagated by 15th-16th Century saint-reformer Srimanta Sankaradeva. It is what Jerusalem is for the Christians, Mecca is for the Sunni Muslims, and Ayodhya has become for many Hindus, whether or not they subscribe to the right-wing Hindutva.

Patronised primarily by the Ahom and Koch rulers, Sankaradeva and his disciples established the satras, which lorded over swathes of land donated by the local kings, elites, and devotees. After India’s independence, specifically after the creation of Bangladesh, many satras in central and western Assam became central to the issue of “illegal immigrants”, a staple of electoral politics in Assam since a violent agitation of 1979-98 to eject non-citizens from the State. The alleged encroachment of satra land by Bengal-origin or migrant Muslims became a rallying point for the BJP, which started building up momentum by the turn of the millennium before coming to power in 2016 in alliance with two regional parties.