NEW DELHI, 26 June 2003 — India’s ruling Hindu nationalist BJP party said yesterday that it was going to keep away from a Hindu-Muslim religious dispute in two holy sites, Kashi and Mathura, in northern India.
However, BJP general secretary Pramod Mahajan added the party was going to stick to a campaign in a larger controversy for the construction of a temple near the site of a razed mosque in Ayodhya.
Mahajan’s comments came at a briefing about a BJP party meet in Gwalior to discuss strategy for upcoming polls, the Press Trust of India reported. Radical Hindus claim Ayodhya is the birthplace of Rama and had demolished the 16th century Babri Mosque in 1992, sparking some of the bloodiest riots in post-independence India.
Mahajan added that although the BJP was in favor of enacting legislation for giving the Ayodhya land to the Hindu community, it could not do so because the move would upset allies in the ruling federal coalition.
Mahajan also dismissed a demand by the radical Hindu group Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) that deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani should resign unless he brought about such a legislation.
The BJP party, which has close ideological links with the VHP, had risen to prominence in national politics in the last decade with the campaign for building a temple in Ayodhya as its main election plank.
VHP has been demanding that Muslims should vacate mosques built near temples in Kashi and Mathura apart from their demand for construction of a Ram temple in Ayodhya. The VHP earlier this week charged the government with trying to force Hindus to give up claims on the holy sites of Kashi and Mathura, both in northern Uttar Pradesh state, in exchange for permission to build a temple in the northern Indian town of Ayodhya near the site of a razed mosque.
He also dismissed VHP’s charges that the government was offering the opening of 1,000 ancient mosques for prayers and job reservations for the Muslim community in an effort to strike an out of court settlement over Ayodhya. Some analysts have said the only reason the BJP is seeking a compromise deal is because the Ayodhya excavations have so far failed to reveal the existence of a temple at the disputed site.
