Tripura: The Ram Mandir in Ayodhya would be completed by January 1, 2024, the year of the Lok Sabha elections, according to Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s announcement on Thursday. This is interpreted as a sign that the Ram Mandir issue, which the saffron camp has raised since BJP leader L K Advani embarked on a Rath Yatra to focus on it in 1990, may once again serve as a pillar of the BJP’s campaign in the upcoming general election.
Attacking Congressman Rahul Gandhi, who is now engaged in the Bharat Jodo Yatra, a 3500-kilometer march from Kanyakumari to Kashmir, he stated, “Rahul baba, listen from Sabroom that a massive Ram Mandir would be completed on January 1, 2024.” Champat Rai, the secretary of the Ram Mandir Trust, and Acharya Satyendra Das, the main priest of the Ram Janmabhoomi temple, released separate statements earlier this week thanking Gandhi for the Bharat Jodo Yatra.
Advani’s Rath Yatra was said to have played a significant role in the BJP’s political recovery in the 1990s after being negatively impacted by Rajiv Gandhi’s election in 1984 and the Mandal Commission decision in the late 1980s, which saw regional parties supporting the OBC cause gain ground. The 16th-century mosque at Ayodhya, which some people thought was the location of a palace where Lord Ram was born, gave rise to a campaign during the Rath Yatra that called for its destruction. The mosque was publicly destroyed in December 1992 by members of the Saffron Brigade.
