Opinion | Krishna In The Gulf: How Modi Made Temples Part Of India's Diplomacy

Hindu places of worship serve energy supply, remittances, trade targets and election messaging, all at once

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Krishna Janmashtami is today, and the midnight aarti will be sung in Mathura, Chennai, and across India. It will also be sung in two Gulf cities where temples have become instruments of Indian foreign policy. In Manama stands a Krishna shrine more than a century older than Bahraini oil. In the Abu Dhabi desert stands a mandir finished in 2024.

Narendra Modi presided at both openings, which his government staged and framed as state occasions.

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For eleven years India has used Hindu places of worship abroad as tools of statecraft. They serve congregations. They also serve energy supply, remittances, trade targets and election messaging, all at once.

A PLAQUE IN MANAMA, A GIFT IN ABU DHABI

In August 2019, Modi became the first Indian prime minister to visit Bahrain, and he ended the trip by unveiling a plaque to launch a $4.2 million redevelopment of the Shreenathji temple in Manama. Traders of the Thattai Bhatia community, who had come from Sindh before Partition, built the shrine in 1817. The plan set out a four-floor building of 45,000 square feet on a 16,500 square foot plot, rising to 30 metres, with a knowledge centre and a museum.

Modi bought prasad at the temple with a RuPay card, one day after he launched the Indian payments network in the UAE, so the gesture doubled as a........

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