AYODHYA, 13 March — The northern town of Ayodhya was turned into a virtual fortress yesterday as thousands of security personnel braced for a looming showdown over a hotly disputed religious site.
After a week of intense and often confusing negotiations aimed at heading off a confrontation, hard-line Hindus still plan to move ahead with preparations for building a temple at the site of a 16th century mosque in Ayodhya that was pulled down 10 years ago by Hindu fanatics.
According to the police control room here, about 10,000 police and paramilitary personnel have been deployed in and around Ayodhya to prevent Hindu activists from entering the town and sparking a confrontation. “Sensitive areas of Ayodhya have been identified and all precautions have been taken to make sure there is no breakdown of law and order with senior officers personally supervising the arrangements,” said A.K. Mitra, deputy inspector general of police in Uttar Pradesh.
The authorities have also constructed 18 makeshift prisons on the outskirts of Ayodhya to house anyone detained for disrupting the peace.
The militant Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) originally wanted to hold a temple ground-breaking ceremony on March 15 near the razed mosque site.
Supreme Court is to rule today on a petition to ban the event. A Muslim shopkeeper, Muhammad Aslam, filed the public interest petition last week, opposing the ceremony, saying he was doing it “on behalf of the country” to prevent violence.
Newspapers quoted legal experts as saying the three-judge bench of the Supreme Court who will hear the petition would have little choice but to order maintenance of the status quo at the site and forbid the ceremony. The court has always maintained nothing should be done to disturb the situation at the site until ownership of it is resolved through legal channels or negotiation. The central government has pledged to maintain the peace in Ayodhya and honor the court ruling.
“Whatever problems we have in this country, efforts should be made to resolve them peacefully through talks,” the Press Trust of India quoted Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, as telling a function.
Should the court find in favor of the petition, the VHP has said it will hold a scaled-down ceremony, involving simple prayer offerings. Muslim leaders have said that any religious ritual near the disputed site would be unacceptable as well as illegal. “We want permission to hold some program on March 15,” said VHP President Ashok Singhal.
“If prevented, we will court arrest, but our program will be extremely peaceful,” he added. Describing the atmosphere in Ayodhya as “tense”, Singhal said the VHP had no wish to aggravate the situation.
“Hindus have traditionally been tolerant and non-violent and we want to strengthen that,” he said. Some 2,000 people were killed in communal riots that followed the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in 1992.
The current showdown comes as the country is still reeling from its worst outbreak of Hindu-Muslim violence in nearly a decade that claimed over 700 lives in Gujarat less than a fortnight ago.
In Gujarat, the state wing of the VHP vowed to defy any order opposing the rituals. It said some 1,000 people were expected to leave yesterday day to try to enter Ayodhya, despite a tight security cordon around the town. “No court can stop us from performing the puja (prayer),” Haresh Bhatt, vice president of the Gujarat unit of the VHP said.
Uttar Pradesh Governor V.K. Shastri met Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Home Minister L.K. Advani in New Delhi yesterday to discuss security measures in Ayodhya. After the talks, Shastri told reporters that his administration “would do its best to see the situation remains normal.” Stringent restrictions have been on the transport of any kind of construction material and public gatherings.
