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Three decades ago when the Ram Mandir movement was at its height, a young Sadhvi Ritambhara became a household name because of her fiery speeches made in chaste Hindi. Audio cassettes of her speeches were heard throughout the Hindi-speaking states.
However, soon after the temple agitation, she largely disappeared from public view and life, eventually settling down in Vrindavan where she runs an ashram that houses orphaned kids, widows, and the elderly.
On Sunday, Ritambhara celebrated her 60th birthday — Shashtipurti Mahotsav — at Vatsalya Gram in Vrindavan. Among the visitors was Union Home Minister Amit Shah, the visit quietly underlining the importance she still has in core Sangh Parivar circles.
Born in Doraha town in Punjab’s Ludhiana district, Ritambhara, born as Nisha, accepted Swami Parmanand Giri of Haridwar as her guru at just 16 years old and became a sadhvi. Her oratory made her a key figure in the 1980s when the Vishva Hindu Parishad, an RSS affiliate, started the Jan Jagran Abhiyan, an umbrella term for Hindu awakening that included the Ram Temple agitation but was not confined to it.
The BJP then was facing a tough time after its rout in the 1984 Lok Sabha elections, following which it had only two seats. Then BJP president Atal Bihari Vajpayee seemed to many within Hindutva organisations as too fixated on “Gandhian socialism” as a slogan for Hindutva to take off in those challenging times for the party. The Rashtriya Sevika Samiti, the women’s wing of the RSS with which Ritambhara was actively associated, came forward to help the VHP provide momentum to the Jana Jagran Abhiyan at a time when the Congress was at the peak of its electoral prowess.
“The Abhiyan conducted the Ganga Mata Bharat Mata Yatra. It tried to get into anything that touched people’s hearts, like the Ganga, which has been revered by common people. There were lectures organised around the Abhiyan. Ram pujas were held in many places. This was a time when charismatic speakers were needed. Their ability to speak brilliantly brought Sadhvi Ritambhara and Uma Bharti to the fore. Both were contemporaries,” recalled Seshadri Chari, former editor of RSS-affiliated weekly Organiser.
During 1990-’92, when the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation gained momentum, Ritambhara became a household name. She was also accused widely of being a “rabble-rouser”. However, she disappeared from public view after 1992, rarely making news except for some episodic controversies.
Periodic controversies
In 1995, she grabbed headlines briefly when she was arrested in Indore for allegedly making inflammatory speeches against Christians. Digvijaya Singh of the Congress was the Chief Minister of the state at the time. The Madhya Pradesh High Court released her after 11 days in prison following which she pledged revenge against the MP government.
She yet again grabbed headlines when the Liberhan Commission in its 2009 report named her among the 68 people who brought the country “to the brink of communal discord” during the temple movement. However, the naming of Vajpayee in the report led to much controversy. When then Congress MP Beni Prasad Verma, in a heated debate on the report, made a disparaging remark about Vajpayee in Parliament, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh apologised the following day on behalf of the government. Later, in 2020, a special CBI court in Lucknow acquitted all the accused in the Babri Masjid demolition case.
In 2022, a church in New Jersey in the US reportedly denied permission for a fundraiser to which Ritambhara was invited after it received multiple letters opposing the event.
Where was Ritambhara for three decades? “She never strayed into electoral politics for which she had contempt. In that sense, she belonged to that school of people in the Sangh Parivar who stayed away from electoral politics. So, she faded away,” said an RSS insider.
He added that she was also into running children’s homes and started one near Mumbai long ago. “She later shifted to Vrindavan and runs the Vatsalya Gram there,” he said.
Shah’s visit to wish her on her 60th birthday briefly brought Ritambhara back into the news, more so because of the optics around it. The visit came a day after PM Narendra Modi unveiled projects in Ayodhya and three weeks before the idol consecration ceremony at the temple with which she had once been famously associated.
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