Dhirendra Krishna Shastri (Bageshwar Baba) is not a free-floating saint but a ruling-party political project: a twenty-nine-year-old hereditary Bundelkhand priest whose “Divya Darbar” cold-readings — sold as Balaji’s voice — underwrite medical harm (gaumutra for cancer, “Muslim-peer” possession), communal mobilisation (Hindu Rashtra, “ticket to Lahore,” economic boycott), and a cash-opaque temple trust now crowned by a Prime Ministerial cancer hospital and Y-category security. Activists who asked him to take a controlled test (Nagpur, 2023) were answered with flight, a police “clean chit,” death threats, and, in February 2025, Modi’s branding of critics as foreign-sponsored enemies of the nation; ministers then walked his November 2025 padyatra. The machine met its first state-side no in September 2026, when Bengal BJP president Samik Bhattacharya rejected Shastri’s Durga Puja meat ban as outsider diktat against Shakta custom — electoral franchise management, not a conversion to secularism — exposing Hindutva’s homogenising fiction at the plate of Navami mutton.