– Abdul Bari Masoud
New Delhi, Jan. 10: Mustering the courage to decline the invitation to the Ram Mandir inauguration slated for January 22, the main opposition party, Congress, said on Wednesday that the temple at Ayodhya has been a “political project” of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). It also underlined that the temple, which is on the site of the 400-year-old historic Babari Masjid, is incomplete.
The Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust sent an invitation to the leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge, chairperson of the Congress Parliamentary Party, Sonia Gandhi, and the party’s leader in the Lok Sabha, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, last month for the pran pratistha (consecration ceremony).
In a terse statement released by Jairam Ramesh, general secretary (communications) of Congress, the party said:
“Lord Ram is worshipped by millions in our country. Religion is a personal matter. But the RSS and BJP have long made a political project of the temple in Ayodhya. The inauguration of the incomplete temple by the leaders of the BJP and the RSS has obviously been brought forward for electoral gain. While abiding by the 2019 Supreme Court judgment and honoring the sentiments of millions who revered Lord Ram, Shri Mallikarjun Kharge, Smt. Sonia Gandhi, and Shri Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury have respectfully declined the invitation to what is clearly an RSS/BJP event.”
It is said that soon after Congress chief Kharge and Sonia Gandhi received their invitation, there was a meeting of top leaders to decide the party’s stand on the matter.
Within the party, however, there are differing opinions on the issue. A section of the party didn’t want the BJP to utilize “the absence of the principal opposition party to target it as anti-Hindu and use it to polarize the electorate.”
According to sources, at the highest level of discussion, the politically delicate topic of how to handle the invitation for the consecration ceremony to Congress’ top leadership had come up.
After threadbare deliberations, the party decided not to attend the event. Besides Kharge and Ms. Gandhi, other senior leaders who were consulted included P. Chidambaram, Ambika Soni, K.C. Venugopal, Jairam Ramesh, Digvijaya Singh, and Randeep Surjewala.
Earlier, CPI (M) and TMC also refused to join the mandir event. CPI (M) called it “politicization” of a religious event.
