Rituals, VIP guests, state-wide celebrations, tours: Naveen Patnaik’s Puri temple event today rings a bell, and BJP hears it

BEATING the Ayodhya consecration by five days, Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik willroll out his own temple gambit on Wednesday. The heritage corridor or Parikrama Prakalpa around the Puri Jagannath Temple is a project that the BJD government launched five years ago, and promoted with much fanfare — and as elections come around, this may be the biggest ace up its sleeve against its principal opposition in state politics, the BJP.

The opening ceremony is also set to match the Ayodhya temple in ambition, with the BJD government billing the Rs 800 crore spent on a 75-metre free passage built around the outer walls (the Meghanada Pacheri) of the temple “the biggest infrastructure push involving the 12th-century shrine in 700 years”.

This ensures a clear and unobstructed view of the 800-year-old shrine, says the government, matching the stated aim of the Modi government’s other showpiece temple project: the Kashi Vishwanath corridor in Varanasi.

If religious rituals leading up to the consecration began at Ayodhya on Tuesday, they have been on in Puri since January 12. Religious fervour has been helped along by a three-day ‘Maha Yajna’ that began on Monday at all the four entrances of the temple. If the CM is scheduled to inaugurate the project, Puri’s erstwhile royal Dibyasingha Deb will conduct the “Poornahuti (culmination of Yajna)” moments after Patnaik inaugurates the Parikrama project.

The guests include religious heads of around 1,000 temples across the country. The famous Pashupatinath Temple in Nepal has also received an invite.

The parallels don’t end here. Like the BJP’s appeal at Ayodhya, the CM has urged people to join Wednesday’s celebrations by lighting diyas, reciting bhajans and kirtans and blowing conches.