Swami Paripoornananda, head of Sri Peetham, which is headquartered at Kakinada in Andhra Pradresh and with an ashram in Hyderabad, joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the presence of its national president Amit Shah in Delhi on Friday evening and declared that he would extensively campaign in the coming Telangana Assembly elections next six weeks. BJP general secretary Ram Madhav was also present.
It is still to be known whether Swami Paripoornananda would fight the Telangana Assembly elections to be held on 7 December, but going by Shah’s remarks that the monk would lead the BJP’s efforts to spread across south India, it appears that the former’s services would be utilised on a larger scale. This is Swami’s second meeting with Shah within a fortnight.
BJP leaders and cadres in Telangana see Swami Paripoornananda as another Yogi Adiyanath, a monk-cum- politician who went on to become Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh last year. Like Yogi Adityanath headed Gorakhpur Math in UP, Paripoornananda leads Sri Peetham, a Math of sorts that spreads Sanatana Hindu Dharma across the South, especially in AP and Telangana.
Paripoornananda, born on 1 November 1972, is fondly called Sadhguru by his followers and has been active in propagating Hindu religion and culture across different platforms and has founded the Bharat Today TV channel in Hyderabad a couple of years ago. He has been in the forefront of the Save Cow moment in both the Telugu speaking states since 2014. He became a saint at the age of 14 years.
The Swami shot into prominence after he was sent out of Hyderabad for three months on 10 July for trying to lead a march from the city to Yadadri, a temple town, 50 km away, in protest against blasphemous comments against Lord Rama by a Dalit film critic, Kathi Mahesh a few days earlier. Huge crowds gathered in support of the Swami’s march on the occasion. However, the ban was lifted subsequently.
Earlier, a year ago, the Swami emerged a hero to Hindu groups when he entered into a debate on a Telugu TV news channel with another Bahujan ideologue, Kancha Ilaiah, on the issue of banning cow slaughter and beef eating public places. On both the occasions, the BJP not just extended solidarity with the Swami, but also hailed him as a leader of Hindus.
The Swami’s entry into BJP is not a sudden development, as the groundwork has been made for the last six months. After a couple of visits of Shah to Telangana and Andhra, it was found that the party in both the states suffer from a lack of powerful leadership. The BJP national president openly expressed his displeasure over half-hearted efforts by local leaders to steer the party to victory in the coming elections.
Shah has set a target of coming to power in at least one of the states and emerging kingmaker in another by 2019. He told the party leaders how the BJP won a spectacular victory in Tripura where it had no base five years before. The BJP accorded top priority to consolidating its position in AP and Telangana, but the ground reports presented a disappointed picture.
This is because of a docile leadership in both the states where the BJP is used to depend on alliances on and off with TDP in the last three decades, especially after the formation of the NDA in 1999. After 2014, BJP swell in ranks in AP through entry of Congress leaders who opposed the bifurcation of the state, while there were no major new additions in Telangana.
After the TDP ended its ties with the BJP four months ago, the BJP leadership expected the state level leaders to gear up and fight from the front against the Chandrababu Naidu government, but that didn’t happen. As a result, the party has made G.V.L. Narasimha Rao a Rajya Sabha member from UP, but entrusted him with the task of coordinating Andhra affairs with the overall in-charge of Ram Madhav.
Even in Telangana, the BJP national leadership is not so happy with the state of affairs. The lone Union minister of state—Bandaru Dattatreya—from Telangana had been dropped in the last Cabinet reshuffle for his failure to lead the party stronger. There are five more MLAs in Telangana, but none of them is a powerful campaigner to meet electoral needs.