So near yet so far, Kanpur delights in Ram Temple’s glory

Sachin Gupta, 25, and Rohit Dubey, 27, have braved the icy winds blowing across from the Ganga to climb up to the Siddhanath Temple in Kanpur’s Jajmau area. But on the minds of both is another shrine, the Ram Temple coming up in Ayodhya, and how their colonies and nearby markets are gearing up for the temple inauguration.

Gupta, who works with Airtel, wishes the government would declare January 22 a gazetted holiday so that people can celebrate “two Diwalis every year”. Dubey, a businessman, has relatives coming from other cities to celebrate the inauguration day.

“Modi-Yogi have made the dreams of Hindus come true,” they say.

Just a kilometre away, in the heart of the Jajmau leather industry, Muzammil, 28, a small-time leather tanner, has a forlorn look on his face.

No, it is not the Ram Temple. “Our profits are going down every day. Every time there is a festival associated with the Ganga or any big event, the tanneries are shut down first, for the fear of polluting the river. We are again going to be shut for five days. It is the government’s job to have the effluent treatment plants working. Why should we suffer? They don’t let us do dry work either,” he says.

As far as Ram Temple is concerned, “What problem could I possibly have? But instead of doing Hindu-Muslim all the time, why don’t they worry about the leather industry? Our business is going to Bangladesh,” Muzammil says.

As the crow flies, Kanpur is around 200 km from Ayodhya, and less than half that distance from state capital Lucknow. But the city that is among Uttar Pradesh’s largest figures on nobody’s map, defined by its declining leather industry and circumscribed by it – including unwelcome spotlight under the BJP regime’s tightened cattle slaughter laws.

Howe