The Hindutva leader, notorious for his communally charged anti-Muslim speeches, was addressing a public meeting at Mangal Bazaar in Usmanpur in Badaun on Friday.
Team Clarion
NEW DELHI — Hardcore Hindutva exponent and chief of the Antarashtriya (International) Hindu Parishad (AHP), Pravin Togadia, has demanded the government to replace all mosques in Mathura, Varanasi and Ayodhya with temples.
Pointing at the almost-constructed Ram temple built on the ruins of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, Togadia asserted that “now was the time for taking Mathura and Kashi (Varanasi).”
The firebrand leader was addressing a public meeting at Mangal Bazaar in Usmanpur in Badaun on Friday. The meeting was part of his tour of the Uttar Pradesh state. Togadia is notorious for his communally charged anti-Muslim speeches.
He said that the Ram temple was not being built to take electoral advantage. “The Ayodhya temple is an honour for all the Hindus and the fruit of their sacrifices and devotion,” media reports reaching here quoted him as saying.
India’s majority of Hindus claim the Babri Masjid site was the birthplace of Lord Ram and was holy to them long before the Mughals razed a temple at the spot and built the mosque there in 1528.
A Hindu mob destroyed the mosque in 1992, triggering riots that killed about 2,000 people across India, most of them Muslims.
Building a Ram temple at the site has been a central campaign theme of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu militant Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for more than three decades.
Hindu and Muslim groups have fought over ownership of the site through litigation. In 2019, the Supreme Court handed over the land to Hindus and ordered the allotment of a separate plot to Muslims.
Although Muslim groups were unhappy with the verdict, they accepted it ‘with humility’. While the inauguration of the temple is scheduled already, the construction of the mosque is yet to begin.
