Temple not put on back burner: Keshari

STATE BHARATIYA Janata Party president Keshari Nath Tripathi said that the party had never backtracked either from the Ayodhya temple or from the Hindutva issues. He was here to take part in a demonstration staged by the South City unit of the party as part of the statewide protest against soaring prices and increasing incidents of terror in the country.

While speaking at the Kidwai Nagar crossing, he said that the Ayodhya issue was never put on the back burner. He added the ‘disputed structure’ was brought down during the BJP rule and the party was committed to build a grand temple there.

He said that during the NDA rule at the Centre, efforts were made to pass a resolution in the Parliament. “However, alliance partners like AIADMK and DMK protested the move. And since the BJP did not want the resolution to be rejected, it decided to withdraw the same,” he said.

Coming back to the BJP’s Hindutva campaign, he questioned whether protests against killings of Hindus in J&K, arrest of Shankaracharya, cow slaughter, etc were not part of Hinduism? Coming down heavily on the CM and SP supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav for siding with the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), Tripathi said that both Mulayam and his brother Shivpal were playing politics of Muslim appeasement by shielding the SIMI.

Earlier, BJP workers led by South City president Radhey Shyam Pandey and others took out a vehicle procession from various localities and reached the Kidwai Nagar crossing. However, the BJP’s programme to take out a ‘padyatra’ could not materialise as heavy police force stopped the activists from proceeding beyond Bakarmandi. The police officials reasoned that the area beyond the point was sensitive and hence they could not allow the procession to proceed further. At this point, the BJP activists courted arrest.