• Friday, March 29, 2024

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Ram Mandir will be ready by January 1, 2024, ahead of general elections: Amit Shah

Indian home minister Amit Shah (ANI Photo)

By: Shubham Ghosh

Indian home minister Amit Shah on Thursday (5) announced the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya will be ready by January 1, 2024, the year the country’s next general elections will be held. He was speaking at a rally in Sabroom in South Tripura district of the north-eastern Indian state of Tripura.

This is being seen as an indication that Ram Mandir, a plank raked up by the saffron camp since 1990 when veteran Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Lal Krishna Advani started out on a Rath Yatra to focus on the issue, may again be one of the cornerstones of BJP’s campaign in the next general election.

“Rahul baba, listen from Sabroom that a mammoth Ram Mandir will be ready on January 1, 2024,” he said attacking Indian National Congress leader Rahul Gandhi who is in the midst of the ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’ (Unite India March), a 3,500-kilometre-long march from Kanyakumari to Kashmir.

Earlier this week, secretary of Ram Mandir Trust Champat Rai and chief priest of Ram Janmabhoomi temple Acharya Satyendra Das had come out with separate statements appreciating Gandhi for his mega walkathon.

Advani’s Rath Yatra was believed a major factor in the rise of the BJP in the 1990s which had been politically hit by both the advent of Rajiv Gandhi in 1984 and the Mandal Commission award in the late 1980s which saw regional parties espousing the cause of India’s Other Backward Classes gaining strength.

The Rath Yatra also saw the spawning of a movement calling for the destruction of the 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya, which some believed was the site of a palace where Lord Ram was born.

It culminated in the public destruction of the mosque by saffron brigade volunteers on December 6, 1992.

Addressing the rally in Tripura, where assembly polls are due early this year, Shah said that the Congress and Communists had put the Ram Mandir issue in the jurisdiction of the court for long, whereas prime minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone for it after the Supreme Court of India’s order permitting construction.

The Congress and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) are the main opposition parties in the BJP-ruled northeastern state and there are indications that the two will fight the assembly election together.

After decades-long legal battle, the Supreme Court on November 9, 2019, paved the way for the construction of the Ram temple in the disputed site at Ayodhya, where Babri Masjid was demolished three decades ago.

The prime minister performed the “Bhoomi puja” (worshipping Mother Earth) land for the construction of the temple on August 5, 2020.

Shah on Thursday flagged off a BJP rath yatra, the second one during the day after Dharmanagar in North Tripura district, aimed at highlighting the achievements of the state’s BJP government.

The country is safe in the hands of Modi, Shah said.

“Ten days after the Pulwama incident in Kashmir, Indian soldiers went inside Pakistan and carried out a successful operation under Modi’s leadership,” he pointed out.

A convoy of India’s Central Reserve Police Force was attacked by a suicide bomber in Pulwama district of Kashmir, killing 40 personnel on February 14, 2019.

The Indian Air Force raided a terrorist camp at Balakot in Pakistan on February 26.

(PTI)

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