June 3, 2002	Monday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 21,1423

NEW DELHI, June 2: A religious ceremony by India’s Hindu hardliners, part of a controversial campaign to build a temple on the ruins of a razed mosque, ended peacefully Sunday in the northern India town of Ayodhya, police said.

“We had deployed about 2,000 policemen as today was the final day of the ceremony and the people were to make a procession,” Rajesh Pratap Singh, deputy inspector general of police in Faizabad district of Uttar Pradesh state, told AFP.

“The whole thing passed off peacefully.”

The 16th-century Babri mosque was demolished by Hindu zealots — some of them aligned to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s ruling BJP party — in December 1992.

Hindus claim the Babri mosque was built at the birthplace of their god Ram.

The destruction of the mosque led to India’s worst Hindu-Muslim riots since 1947, in which 2,000 people were killed.

Last January, a conclave of Hindu priests set March 12 this year as the deadline for the federal government to “clear all obstacles in the path of the temple construction.”

Efforts by Vajpayee to find a solution proved unsuccessful and after intense lobbying by senior government ministers, hardline Hindus relented, holding a scaled-down ceremony at Ayodhya on March 15.

The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council — VHP), which has been spearheading the campaign to build the temple in Ayodhya, had then set a June 2 deadline to begin construction.—AFP