NEW DELHI: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will attend a
groundbreaking ceremony next month for a Hindu temple on a disputed site in
northern India where a 16th century mosque was torn down by Hindu hard-liners
in 1992, according to the trust overseeing the temple construction.
The
ceremony is set for Aug 5, a date organizers said was astrologically auspicious
for Hindus but that also marks a year since the Indian Parliament revoked the semi-autonomous status of
Muslim-majority state, occupied Jammu and Kashmir.
The
symbolism was impossible to miss for both supporters and opponents of Modi's
Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, whose manifesto had for
decades included pledges to strip restive Kashmir's autonomy and to build a
temple to the Hindu deity Ram where the Mughal-era mosque once stood, a site in
the city of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh state.
Because the corona virus is still rampaging across India, which has reported the world’s third-highest caseload, the ceremony will be broadcast live on state television and the number of participants and spectators will be limited, according to Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or the World Hindu Organisation, a Hindu nationalist group allied with the BJP.
The temple will serve as an enduring and immortal beaming center of social harmony, national unity and integration and awakening of the feeling of Hindutva, or Hindu way of life, the organisation’s spokesperson Vinod Bansal said in a news release on Saturday.
A
century-long dispute over the site was resolved last year following the BJP’s
landslide election victory.
In
November, the Supreme Court
ruled in favour of the temple trust, saying that Muslim petitions
would be given five acres at an alternative site.
Hindus
hard-liners have long contended that Mughal Muslim invaders built a mosque on
top of a preexisting temple in the ancient city of Ayodya.
A
December 1992 riot following the destruction of the mosque sparked communal
violence in which about 2,000 people were killed, mostly Muslims.
Meanwhile,
the trial in the demolition court case continues to be heard in a special
court.
An
architect from Ahmedabad, Gujarat, Modi’s home state, has proposed a towering
sandstone structure 161 feet (49 metres) high with five domes.
Yogi
Adityanath, Uttar Pradesh’s chief minister and a Hindu monk, requested that
Ayodhya hold a special cleaning and purification ceremony and for all of the
city’s temples to light oil lamps ahead of Modi’s visit, the Press Trust of
India news agency reported.
Adityanath
said the occasion marked the end of a 500 year struggle, PTI reported.
