Ayodhya braces for showdown today: More troops amassed; VHP adamant about prayers
AYODHYA, March 14: A major showdown loomed in Ayodhya on Thursday, after Hindu activists vowed to stage an inflammatory religious ceremony in defiance of a supreme court ban and government warnings.
A meeting here of Hindu leaders of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) decided to go ahead with the banned ceremony on Friday.
In New Delhi, the parliament was adjourned after an uproar as the opposition asked the government to explain why the attorney general had said in the supreme court on Wednesday that a “token ceremony” could be allowed in Ayodhya.
The activists said they would march towards the site of the Babri mosque razed by Hindu zealots in 1992, carrying pre-carved stones for a temple they plan to build to the Hindu warrior god Ram.
“We will all go,” said VHP national secretary Rajendra Singh Pankaj.
“No power on earth can stop us. If they prevent us, we will all get arrested and then launch an agitation never seen in history,” Pankaj said.
The defiant stand came just hours after Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee pledged to uphold Wednesday’s court ruling that “no religious activities of any nature, by anyone” could be held in or around the razed mosque site.
“I wish to categorically and unequivocally state that the government will implement the court order in letter and in spirit,” Vajpayee said in parliament.
Nearly 10,000 police and paramilitary personnel have massed in Ayodhya to prevent the ceremony taking place, and a police official said the activists would be detained the second they left the workshop where the Ram temple stones are being crafted.
“We will arrest them at the gate of the workshop. We will not allow them to go out,” Rai said.
In a display of strength, some 1,000 members of a paramilitary police unit marched through the streets of Ayodhya around midday, and police said a large number of Hindu activists had been arrested 100 kilometres away as they tried to march on the town.
No vehicles were being allowed into Ayodhya without valid passes and local residents were required to carry special cards if they wanted to move around.
The security forces have taken up positions at every major intersection as well as nearby temples, villages and fields, and even the Saryu river that rings the town.
Water cannon and fire trucks were also standing by.
Friday’s ceremony will be led by Ramchandra Paramhans, an aging Hindu ascetic who has threatened to commit suicide if the security forces intervene.
“In the name of Ram, for Ram and against this government, I will kill myself,” said Paramhans, who is viewed as the spiritual architect of the temple construction campaign.
The rhetoric has again raised the spectre of the 1992 destruction of the Babri mosque, which triggered post-independence India’s worst Hindu-Muslim riots, killing 2,000.
Sectarian tensions are already at boiling point following communal riots in Gujarat that killed 700 people.
Senior police officials here said measures had also been taken to guard against a possible terrorist attack, following intelligence reports that “terrorists” were trying to infiltrate the ranks of the Hindu activists. “It is a very high-grade intelligence input and we are taking no chances,” said a police official.
UPROAR IN PARLIAMENT: The coalition partners of BJP also expressed profound disquiet at Attorney General Soli Sorabjee’s remarks, saying they should have been consulted.
A senior leader of the Congress Party, Jaipal Reddy, said the government and therefore implicitly Vajpayee had perpetrated a “humongous fraud” on the country as Sorabjee’s remarks had sided with the VHP in court.
But Reddy’s remark provoked a storm of protest from the government benches and the speaker was forced to adjourn the house.
The BJP was once a leading light of the Ayodhya temple construction drive, but since coming to power in the late 1990s it has distanced itself from the divisive campaign.—AFP
