Bhopal: The Shivraj Singh Chouhan government will fund a "Bharat Mata Mandir" in BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh, where Assembly elections are scheduled to be held in November.

The Chouhan cabinet met on Wednesday evening and allocated over five hectares of government land to the Bhopal Municipal Corporation for the construction of the temple near the city's airport, according to minister Narottam Mishra.

A Haj House is located in the vicinity of the proposed temple. Bhopal mayor Alok Sharma said the temple would become operational by the year-end.

The idea of Bharat Mata was first conceived by Abanindranath Tagore, artist and nephew of Rabindranath Tagore. In 1905, Abanindranath had portrayed Bharat Mata as a four-armed goddess wearing saffron-coloured robes and holding a book, sheaves of rice, a garland and a white cloth.

The image of Bharat Mata in pre-Independence India stirred nationalist feelings.

At the cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Chouhan said the Bharat Mata idol at the temple would serve as a goddess "for all religious deities, freedom fighters and leaders".

The chief minister is said to have recalled that in 1936, Mahatma Gandhi had inaugurated a Bharat Mata temple in Varanasi. In Haridwar too, there is a Bharat Mata temple, which was inaugurated by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1983.

Chouhan's move to allocate land for the Bharat Mata temple in Bhopal comes barely a month after RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat unveiled a 16ft statue of Bharat Mata in Ujjain in the same state.

While unveiling the statue, Bhagwat had said: "While worshipping the 'motherland', we have to consider the entire society as ours. We should be free from barriers of 'ours versus theirs' and 'big versus small'. Where there are cordial ties, there is no ego."