The ground-breaking ceremony at the Ayodhya’s Ram Janmabhoomi will be attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi today and other VIP dignitaries. As many as 175 eminent guests, including 135 seers have been invited for the ceremony.
On Tuesday evening entire Ayodhya was seen illuminated with earthen lamps ahead of the foundation stone laying ceremony of the Ram Temple. Devotees lit diyas on the banks of Saryu river as part of the ‘deepotsava’ celebrations in the temple town.
PM Modi is expected to arrive in Ayodhya at 11:30am today. He will fly from Delhi to Lucknow today morning, from where he will take a chopper to Ayodhya. PM will firstly visit Hanumangarhi temple – a shrine to Lord Hanuman. After this he will proceed to the makeshift temple to Ram Lalla and then to the disputed site.
Besides PM Modi, 50 VIPs including Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and Mohan Bhagwat – the chief of the BJP’s Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) will attend the ceremony.
The first invitation for the bhoomi pujan ceremony was sent to Iqbal Ansari, a litigant in the decades-old temple-mosque dispute.
Lal Krishna Advani, who once lead the temple movement will not be present in the ceremony. Amid the coronavirus pandemic situation L K Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi will attend the ceremony through video-conference. Ram Janmabhoomi Teertha Kshetra Trust issued a last-minute invite to both veteran leaders.
Uma Bharati is in Ayodhya but will not be present at the site of the ceremony. Once the face of the temple movement, Uma Bharati is camping out at the banks of the Saryu river. The BJP leader who played a pivotal role in the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, said she will go to the site once the programme is over. On Tuesday she said, “Ram will never become a political figure, those who will try to make Ram a political figure will perish, Narendra Modi Ji has always said that it is team India and that is why I am requesting even through you to the some BJP people who are creating such kind of impression that there is some kind of patent of BJP. No, there is no patent of BJP on Ram, or Ram Bhakti or Ayodhya.”
Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray has not been invited. Shiv Sena which supported the temple movement, demanded an invitation. The party broke its 35-year alliance with the BJP after last year’s Assembly elections but it is upset over not being invited. The party said it had given “blood and sweat” for the temple.
The Congress has also not been sent any invitation. Party’s General Secretary Priyanka Gandhi posted a tweet to say that Lord Ram is with everyone, and expressed hope that today’s ceremony will become an occasion for “national unity, fraternity and cultural congregation”.