Ayodhya Railways Station
By Manish Anand
New Delhi, January 20: The mainstream media with television as an exemplar appears to have become ‘Ram Katha Vachaks (Ram story tellers)’ to build the feverish backdrop for the consecration of the idol in Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh on Monday. While the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is seemingly eying non-stop printing of votes with the consecration ceremony, the Opposition is seen to have struck divergent notes on the event.
Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal is brimming with enthusiasm in saffron fervor. Delhi government is now hosting ‘Ram Leela’ for two days in the national capital. Kejriwal wants to be the foremost ‘Ram Katha Vachak’ in Delhi to further sweat out the BJP on the political turf of the national capital.
Fresh from hosting ‘Sundar Kand paath’ in all the 70 Assembly constituencies in Delhi, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) appears to have asserted that the outfit is a step ahead of the BJP in exploiting the religious sentiments of the people for the political purposes. Delhi BJP leaders are now debating the timing of the arrest of Kejriwal to seemingly gain access to power in the national capital.
Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati also turned out to be politically astute to escape the apparent BJP trap against the Opposition parties with the consecration event. With Prime Minister Narendra Modi consecrating the idol, the BJP would have known that the Opposition parties would skip the event and thus give the chance to label them being against ‘Sanatan Dharma’. But Mayawati dismissed the poll plot of the BJP, saying “she has no problem at all with the inauguration of the temple as well as the mosque that would come up in Ayodhya”.
The Congress invited the full decibel of the BJP hectoring on the ‘Sanatan Dharma’ by the party leaders Sonia Gandhi, Mallikarjuna Kharge, and Adhir Ranjan Chaudhury declining the invitations to Ayodhya on the ground that the religion is a personal matter and the event has been designed to be political.
But the Congress is inviting criticism for being vacillating in matters of Hindutva in politics. Former Congress president Rahul Gandhi often is seen in the company of seers, in Madhya Pradesh, Kedarnath and Karnataka, but the party disassociated with Ayodhya. A section of the Congress leaders claim that the party is warming up to a limited electoral turf in the southern states for the Lok Sabha elections where the party would eye the Muslim votes.
But former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav equally needs the Muslim votes in a good measure to survive the saffron storm in the state. He didn’t decline the invitation to the consecration ceremony, and respectfully replied in a letter, saying that he along with his family members would soon after be seeking the blessings of Ram Lalla.
The Janata Dal (United) had stated on the sidelines of the meeting of the national executive in the national capital that the party leaders, if invited, would go to Ayodhya. The JD (U) leader KC Tyagi had said that his party believes in the ‘Sanatan Dharma’.
But West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress drew a sharp line to stay away from the Ayodhya event. She appears to have calculated that an almost 28 per cent Muslim voters in West Bengal would be party of her presence in Ayodhya while being reassured that the state is a land of ‘Goddess Kali’.
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