February 26, 2003	Wednesday	Zul Hijjah 24, 1423

NEW DELHI: With flowing white locks, beards and the saffron robes that mark them as Hindu holy men, they marched to Parliament in the Indian capital on Monday to demand legislation that would enable them to finally possess the land on which they claim their warrior god Ram was born 10,000 years ago.

But for legal hurdles concerning legal title to the ancient strip of land in Ayodhya town in northern Uttar Pradesh state, the holy men would have ensured that by now a grand temple to Ram stood on the site where they had, for that very purpose, torn down a mediaeval mosque in December 1992.

The 10 intervening years saw the rise of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s pro-Hindu, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rise to national power from being an obscure regional party in a political space dominated by the professedly secular Congress party.

Now, it is payback time.

Under pressure from the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) or World Hindu Forum, with close links to the ruling BJP, the government has moved the Supreme Court to vacate a ban on religious activity at the site. The court has responded by constituting a five- member bench which will decide on the issue through a sitting slated from March 6.

Organizations representing the Muslim community, such as the All-Indian Muslim Personal Law Board, have objected to the haste by which the Vajpayee government seems to have been served an ultimatum by the VHP that the site at Ayodhya would be forcibly taken over in March.

After a noisy weekend ‘Dharam Sansad’ or religious jamboree, the holy men, many of them VHP members, decided to take their case to the gates of Parliament to give it a chance to intervene in the title dispute.

Calling the agitation a “religious war to end all religious wars”, VHP’s firebrand leader Praveen Togadia declared that if the temple to Ram does not come up soon “we will turn every village in the country into an Ayodhya”.

Togadia said he was not particular that the BJP and Vajpayee stayed in power, but would support any political group, including the Congress party, if it supported the temple cause.

“We have nothing against you (the Congress party) and love all those who have love for Ram,” Togadia said in a speech in which he promised the Congress party the backing of majority Hindus and a two-third majority in the next elections if it would endorse the Ram temple project.

Time is rapidly running out for the Congress party and its Italian-born leader Sonia Gandhi, which faces the BJP in a series of crucial state assembly elections this year. Polls are due in states like northern Himachal Pradesh, where she has been campaigning for polling by denouncing the BJP’s “communal politics”.

The Congress party is smarting from a resounding defeat it suffered at the hands of the BJP in western Gujarat state in December. There, in spite of accusations that it was behind a pogrom unleashed in February and March last year, the pro-Hindu party captured two-thirds of the state assembly seats in elections.

Political analysts say that the BJP victory was the result of polarization of votes between majority Hindus and the minority Muslims — who form 10 per cent of Gujarat’s population. The party’s general secretary, Venkiah Naidu, declared that the “experiment” would be replicated in other states.

As the Hindu holy men, backed by hundreds of supporters waving tridents and blowing conch shells, gathered outside Parliament, Gandhi told the Lok Sabha (lower house) that “it is incumbent on all of us to wait for and respect the verdict of the judiciary” on the temple project.

But the VHP is in no mood to wait for any legal process. It has announced a mass awareness programme that will run through most of March.

Vocal leaders of the VHP such as Ashok Singhal have declared that irrespective of how the Supreme Court decides on the ownership issue, the construction of the temple would begin.

Singhal said he could not understand why, when the overwhelming majority of legislators in Parliament were Hindu by faith, they could not legislate to settle the dispute.

But the Times of India, in an editorial on Monday, saw a ruse in the VHP’s posturing. It also accused the BJP of adopting a “carefully contrived posture of ambiguity towards the VHP’s agenda, alternating between counsels of restraint and open show of support.”

Togadia’s demands go beyond the Ram temple at Ayodhya. He also seeks the renaming of India as “Hindustan”, repudiating its constitutional identity as a secular country that respects all faiths equally.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.