The morning air in Bodh Gaya carries the scent of incense and the soft murmur of mantras. But two kilometres from the revered Mahabodhi Temple – one of Buddhism's four holiest pilgrimage sites – a different sound rises.
“Repeal the BTA. Give Mahabodhi Mahavihara to Buddhists. BTA is anti-constitutional.”
The BTA or the Bodh Gaya Temple Act of 1949 is a law that established an eight-member management committee evenly split between Buddhists and Hindus, with Gaya’s district magistrate serving as an ex-officio chairperson. For over a month, approximately 100 bhikkhus (Buddhist monks) in saffron and maroon robes have maintained a continuous presence at Domuhan Road. Previously stationed closer to the temple itself, they were relocated by local authorities – a move that only intensified the protest.
The demonstrations are being organised by the All Indian Buddhist Forum and supported by Buddhist organisations from different states.
Akash Lama, who is leading the protest, told Newslaundry, “The Bihar government should give us a written assurance that the BTA will be repealed. Until we get the assurance, we will protest. Our fight is not against any religion.”
The BTA was passed by the Bihar government to resolve a long-standing tussle between Buddhists and Hindu heads of the Mahabodhi mutt over the control of the Mahabodhi Temple. This law earlier stipulated that the DM would be the ex-officio chairman only if from the Hindu community. In 2013, the Bihar government changed this rule, and now any DM, regardless of religion, can be the ex-officio chairman.
This is not the first time protests have been organised around this demand. Buddhists have been protesting intermittently for the last three decades. “We had agitated earlier too, but the movement was suppressed,” said Akash Lama.
While the Maharashtra-based outfit Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi has thrown its weight behind protesters, political parties in Bihar are yet to publicly react to the issue. Asked for comment, BJP spokesperson Guru Prakash Paswan and Janata Dal (United) spokesperson Niraj Kumar said they are not aware of the issue while RJD spokesperson Jayant Jigyasu told Newslaundry that the government should consider the protesters’ demand and reach “a practical solution”.
‘No response from government’
Buddhist monk Gyanbodhi, in his 70s, came to the Domuhan Road protest site from Jagdalpur in Bastar district of Chhattisgarh. “If Buddha is the incarnation of Vishnu, then keep the idol of Buddha in Ram Temple, Krishna Temple, Vishnu Temple, and other temples. Will you do that?”
“All religious places like temples, gurdwaras, and mosques are managed by people of those religions, but the BTA is so flawed that it recommends Hindus in the management committee of the Mahabodhi Temple, a sacred place for Buddhists,” said Akash Lama. “We also demand that worship in the Mahabodhi Temple should be conducted according to Buddhist rituals.”
Bhadant Pragyasheel Mahathero, a 56-year-old Buddhist monk who has been in Bihar since 1993, said, “The Bodh Gaya Mahavihara belongs to Buddhists. If we went to Vishnupad Temple and sat inside, would Hindus allow us to do so? If you say that Hindus and Buddhists are one, then allow us to sit in all Hindu temples.”
In 2012, Buddhist monks Bhante Arya Nagarjuna Shurai Sasai and Gajendra Mahanand filed a writ petition before the Supreme Court to repeal the BTA, but the case is yet to be listed. On November 26, 2023, Buddhist monks organised a rally in Gaya and submitted a memorandum to the central and state governments as well as the National Commission for Minorities. The next year, on September 17, they again took to the streets in Patna to press for their demand.
But the government is yet to respond to these demands, according to protesters. “We spoke to Bihar home secretary Animesh Pandey. He asked for 10 days’ time, but 12 days have passed and we haven’t received any response from the government,” claimed Lama.
The BTMC currently has six members, including two Hindus and four Buddhists, with two remaining posts vacant. Most of the current members refused to comment on the ongoing protests.
Arvind Kumar Singh, a Hindu member of the BTMC, told Newslaundry, “Currently we are a minority in BTMC. Additionally, a Buddhist is a secretary so now whatever Buddhists want, they are doing. But I don’t want to say anything as the case is in court.”
The Gaya DM did not respond to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, the question about who the temple belongs to has been around for centuries.
From Ashoka to Khilji, and a mahant’s entry
It is believed that in the third century, Emperor Ashoka came to Bodh Gaya to worship the Bodhi tree, where Prince Siddhartha Gautama, at the age of 35, attained enlightenment after meditating for 49 days and became Buddha around 500 BCE. During his reign, Ashoka built the temple and declared Buddhism the official religion of his empire, which spanned from Afghanistan to Bangladesh, excluding some parts of southern India. During his time and afterward, until the Pala dynasty, the entire management of the Bodhi Temple remained in the hands of the Buddhists.
But the 13th century brought dramatic change when Turkish ruler Bakhtiar Khilji’s invasion ended Pala rule and began Buddhism’s decline in the region, according to Imtiaz Ahmed, professor of history at the Patna University and the former director of the Khuda Baksh Library. According to the temple’s website, by the first half of the 13th century AD, the influence of Buddhism had decreased considerably, but the temple was still under Buddhist control. It is unclear what the condition of the temple was until 1590, when a Hindu monk, Ghamandi Giri, appeared at the Mahabodhi Temple and began living there. He called it a Hindu temple, conducted puja, established the Bodh Gaya mutt and became known as the mahant. Since then, for about 300 years, this temple was under the control of Hindu mahants.
A Sri Lankan monk, the Viceroy and the Congress
A book titled The Revival of Buddhist Pilgrimage at Bodh Gaya (1811-1949) by Alan Trevithick has chronicled the events that led to the formation of the BTA and the modern chapter of this dispute.
According to the book, in January 1891, Sri Lankan Buddhist monk Anagarika Dharmapala visited India for the first time with Japanese Buddhist monks Theravada and Kozen Gunaratna. They subsequently went to the Mahabodhi Temple and other places associated with Lord Buddha. In 1891, Dharmapala founded the Maha Bodhi Society to press for the demand to hand over the management of the temple to Buddhists. He also began publishing the Mahabodhi journal in 1892, and in its first issue’s editorial, he wrote that Bodh Gaya was to Buddhists what Mecca is to Muslims and Jerusalem is to Christians and Jews.
“Even during Muslim rule, the Mahabodhi Mahavihara was occupied by a Hindu mahant. He kept taking care of it…It was Anagarika Dharmapala ji who fought with the mahant and occupied parts of the Mahabodhi Mahavihara,” Bhikkhu Pragyadeep, the secretary of The All India Bhikkhu Sangh, told Newslaundry.
An article on the website of the Mahabodhi Society of India states, “The crowning glory of Bodhisattva Anagarika Dharmapala was the saving of Bodh Gaya, where Buddha was enlightened, from its cruel neglect and restoring it as a rightful place of worship and homage for the whole world.”
Since then, the demand for giving full control of the Mahabodhi Mahavihara to Buddhists started gaining popularity.
In 1903, Anagarika Dharmapala’s efforts led Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India, to consider giving the Bodh Gaya temple management to Buddhists, but the mahant resisted any compromise. As administrative efforts didn’t bear fruit, Dharmapala decided to take a political path. He approached the Indian National Congress, which was, at that time, a prominent political force. The party decided to back peaceful Buddhist participation in management and organised a conference of Buddhists in Gaya on December 16, 1922. The conference was chaired by Nanda Kishore Lal, the legal advisor of the Maha Bodhi Society.
At the conference, an Indian National Congress Committee was formed under the leadership of Congress leader Dr Rajendra Prasad to evaluate the proposal to hand over the temple’s management to Buddhists. Prasad, in his report to Congress, proposed a joint committee for the management of the Maha Bodhi Temple.
Since the temple was under the control of the Hindu mahant, the Hindu Mahasabha was an important stakeholder. The Mahasabha held a couple of meetings to sense the Hindu sentiments, and after the Kanpur Conference in 1935, the Hindu Mahasabha also agreed to form a committee to evaluate the demands of Buddhists. A new committee was announced, composed of members from the Hindu Mahasabha and the Buddhist community. They were directed to work in cooperation with Prasad’s long-standing Indian National Congress committee.
Prasad submitted a final report, which talked about a joint management board comprising four Buddhist and four Hindu members, including the mahant of Bodh Gaya, and an additional Hindu member, a provincial minister, to be appointed by the “sanatan members”.
The Maha Bodhi Society sought many amendments in the bill, including a Buddhist majority committee. To satisfy them, Congress leader Sri Krishna Sinha moved an amendment to establish a separate “advisory board” to be appointed by the state government.
After India gained independence in 1947, Bihar’s Congress government, led by Sri Krishna Sinha, drafted the Bodh Gaya Temple Act in 1948 in line with the proposal of the Rajendra Prasad-led committee and sought public opinion. The act was passed by the Bihar Legislative Assembly on June 19, 1949. Finally, on May 28, 1953, the management of the temple was transferred from the mahant to a newly formed management committee. Since then, the Mahabodhi Temple has been managed according to the act.
Destruction of a temple and Lalu’s ‘betrayal’ in 1992
When Lalu Prasad, with support from backward communities and the Yadav-Muslim combine, came to power in the state in 1990, a wave of hope ran among Buddhists with monks demanding the repeal of the BTA.
The initial response was warm. Lalu promised that the management of the Mahabodhi temple would be handed over to Buddhists. In 1992, he even drafted a new bill, the Bodh Gaya Mahavihar Act, which was supposed to replace the existing BTA. The proposed bill prohibited Hindu marriages in the vicinity of the temple and banned idol immersion in the pond near the Mahabodhi Temple. The draft bill proposed handing over the management of the temple to the Buddhists.
On May 18 of that year, some workers of the Bodhisattva Ambedkar Sangh entered the vicinity of the Bodh Gaya Temple and destroyed a temple, which is claimed by the Hindu Mahant to be the Pandava Temple. They also ransacked an earthen pitcher kept on Ungam. The workers had claimed that the five idols which Hindus identify as the Pandavas are actually idols of Buddha. The idol of Mahamaya, who was the mother of Buddha, was claimed to be Draupadi. They also claimed that Ungam was actually the pedestal of Lord Buddha.
However, the draft went into cold storage, and Lalu, to pacify the protesters, appointed four protesting Buddhist monks to the BTMC. Bhadant Pragyasheel Mahathero was one of them. He told Newslaundry, “After a long protest in 1995, the committee was changed and four Buddhist monks were included in the committee…We had directly interacted with Laluji. He had asked us to run the BTMC in better ways. I was made in charge of looking after the day-to-day activities of the BTMC. I was later appointed as the superintendent of the BTMC and then as the secretary.”
However, in 2004, the then RJD government removed Bhadant Pragyasheel from his position as secretary of the BTMC and appointed RJD leader Kalicharan Yadav, which attracted sharp criticism. The All India Bhikkhu Sangh alleged that former CM Lalu Prasad had betrayed his promises to hand over the BTMC to Buddhists.
‘Creating a rift between Hindus and Buddhists’
The All India Bhikkhu Sangh, an association of more than 7,000 ordained Buddhist monks, is not supporting the protest, stating that the tone of the protest is not appropriate. Bhikkhu Pragyadeep, secretary of All India Bhikkhu Sangh, said, “The question is valid: Why should there be Hindus in the management of Buddhist religious places? But to achieve the demand, we need cooperation from Hindus. However, the protesters’ tone is different. They are creating rifts between Hindus and Buddhists. That is why we are not taking interest in the protests.”
“There were no Buddhist followers, so the Hindu mahant looked after the temple. He would worship with Hindu traditions. He would put a tika on the forehead of the idol of Buddha. Devotees would offer trishul in Buddha’s hands. The temple appeared to be like any other Hindu temple. When the act was passed, Buddhist monks started coming to the temple, and they slowly brought back the actual characteristics of Lord Buddha as well as the temple,” he claimed.
“The people making demands now had agitated for the same cause 25 years ago. When the agitation succeeded, Lalu offered them positions to manage the temple in a better way. Had they stuck to their demand for repealing the law then, today’s agitation wouldn’t be necessary. It was a missed opportunity during Lalu’s time.”
The writer is an independent journalist based in Patna.
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