AYODHYA, India, 16 March — An attempt to hold controversial religious ceremony by the extremist Hindu seers in the northern Uttar Pradesh state town of Ayodhya fizzled out yesterday when the administration thwarted their move to enter the heavily-guarded site. Hard-line Hindus, however, claimed a symbolic victory in their campaign to build the temple on India’s most sensitive religious site after they held a scaled-down ceremony. The move by the state administration also averted a potentially bloody showdown with police.
Despite a court ban on a ceremony and a 10,000-strong police presence in the town, militant Hindu leaders handed over stones designed for the temple — which they want to build over the razed Babri Mosque — to an envoy of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.
There had been fears of wide-scale violence, but the ceremony went off largely peacefully. The only trouble in Ayodhya came when police and paramilitary personnel baton-charged around 200 Hindu zealots as they tried to break through a police cordon after the ceremony.
The militants held brief prayers at a temple one kilometer away from the destroyed mosque after relenting to fierce government pressure to steer clear of inflaming simmering communal tempers. The Hindu militants had initially vowed to begin construction yesterday of the temple on the site of the Babri Mosque, despite orders from the Supreme Court to keep away from the area in the wake of the deadliest Hindu-Muslim rioting in the country in a decade.
But the hard-liners, under intense lobbying by government ministers, instead conducted their ceremony at the temple guest house of their leader Ramchandra Paramhans. Paramhans, who had earlier said he would commit suicide rather than give in, had been subjected to personal telephone appeals the night before from Vajpayee, Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh and Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani, himself a prominent figure in the temple campaign. The extreme right-wing Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council), however, said the stone dedication marked only the beginning of the temple campaign. Paramhans, an aging ascetic, said he had succeeded in at least handing over the stones.
Vajpayee breathed a sigh of relief after a showdown was averted, but he came under attack from both friends and foes over the powder keg temple-building movement. Vajpayee praised Uttar Pradesh Governor Vishnu Kant Shastri for his “deft handling” of events.
But despite the lack of violence, the opposition and allies of the coalition government, which is led by Vajpayee’s ruling Hindu extremist Bharatiya Janata Party, said the VHP’s symbolic ritual in Ayodhya should not have gone ahead.
