A two-storey building in North Calcutta’s Bagbazar, associated for over a century with Maa Sarada, is to have its most famous visitor in recent years on Tuesday evening when Prime Minister Narendra Modi ascends the stairs leading to the rooms where Ramakrishna Paramhansa's wife had spent the last 11 years of her life.
The much publicised and also politicised visit to Mayer Bari, coming in the midst of a high-octane election, has brought to light a long-drawn tussle between the governments headed by Narendra Modi in Delhi and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee in Bengal over a proposal to renovate Mayer Bari as a heritage zone and develop it into an international tourism centre.
“The Centre has altogether stopped the funds for the project. The state government has footed the bills and work is still on,” said Sashi Panja, minister of women and child development and social welfare in the Bengal government, who is also the local MLA.
“This visit [by the PM] is political,” said Panja.
The project, she said, was sanctioned in 2013 under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, with a 60-40 Centre-state contribution. Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014. Three years later, in 2017, the Trinamul-led Calcutta Municipal Corporation took over the project.
“There were slums in front of Mayer Bari. An alternate arrangement has been made for the dwellers and they are being rehabilitated,” said Panja.
In 2016, the Bengal government had allocated Rs 30 crore for the rehabilitation of the people living around the premises.
So far, 80 dwelling units in four blocks with 20 flats each have been built and handed over, said Calcutta Municipal Corporation councillor Bapi Ghosh.
“We have received around Rs 17 crore from the state government. Within a year, another 100 dwellers will be rehabilitated,” Ghosh said. “Mayer Bari is a heritage building. Therefore, it cannot be touched. We are developing the area around it to get more footfall.”
History of Mayer Bari and the new friction point
On May 23, 1909, Maa Sarada had moved from her abode in Dakshineswar to the Bagbazar house, which became a pilgrimage for the disciples of Ramakrishna Paramhansa and Maa Sarada, and in the decades that followed, for the people of Bengal as well as tourists.
When the building was completed in 1908, the offices of the Mission's journal, Udbodhan, occupied the ground floor, while Maa Sarada lived on the floor above.
Modi’s visit to Mayer Bari, where he is to interact with monks from various Hindu monastic orders including the Ramkrishna Mission, gives it a political stamp.
Tuesday’s visit assumes significance in the backdrop of chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s name calling of some Hindu monks, whom she accused of “interference” in the ongoing Lok Sabha polls.
In his recent speeches while campaigning in Bengal, Modi has raised the issue in every speech to claim that India will not forgive Mamata for her utterances against the monks of the Ramakrishna Mission and others like the Bharat Sevashram.
Tuesday’s public meetings addressed by Modi were no different.
“The Trinamul has started abusing the Hindu monks and ascetics," he said on Tuesday in his address at Barasat’s Ashoknagar ahead of his visit to Mayer Bari. "Ramakrishna Mission, Iskcon and Bharat Sevashram Sangha are respected all over the world, but Trinamul has started abusing them to carry forward its agenda of vote jihad.”
