New Delhi: Veteran Bharatiya Janata Party leader and former deputy prime minister L.K. Advani stayed away from the pran pratishtha ceremony of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, citing the extreme cold conditions in north India. Advani led the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in the 1990s, and his rath yatra culminated in the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992.Advani is now 96. The Shri Ram Janmbhoomi Teerth Kshetra had reportedly told him and his colleague, Murli Manohar Joshi, not to attend the January 22 ceremony. However, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad then made a show of inviting the two senior BJP leaders.The ceremony on Monday was led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.As The Wire has reported:The Bharatiya Janata Party was founded in 1980 and Advani assumed leadership of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in 1984 before becoming party president in 1986.In 1989, the BJP announced that the construction of a Ram temple on the land where they believed Lord Ram was born – and where the Babri Masjid had stood for over 400 years – was its key political agenda.In the autumn of 1990, Advani launched a rath yatra from Somnath to Ayodhya, the purpose of which was to stir up support for the demand for the construction of a Ram temple at the spot where the mosque stood.A Shiv temple had stood in Somnath since at least the 6th century CE. It was demolished and reconstructed several times over the centuries. The last demolition came at the hands of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in 1665. It lay in ruins until 1950 when its reconstruction began under the prime ministership of Jawaharlal Nehru.Advani’s choice of beginning the yatra at Somnath and ending in Ayodhya thus had a very powerful symbolic value of ‘reclaiming’ the temple in Ayodhya as was done in Somnath.He wrote in his 2008 book My Country My Life:“The choice of Somnath as the starting point of the yatra had a powerful symbolic value, made evident by repeated references to it as the target of Muslim tyranny against the Hindus…The intention was to contextualise Ayodhya in the historical lineage of Muslim aggression and then to seek legitimacy for Mandir movement by drawing a parallel. The parallel the Sangh Parivar drew was with the reconstruction of the Somnath temple.”Advani’s rath yatra made it abundantly clear that he was not carrying a message of peace. Pictures of him carrying a trishul, an axe, a sword and a bow and arrow also emerged. Workers of the Bajrang Dal and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad pasted posters along the route of the yatra of the proposed temple and the ‘treachery’ of Muslims.Through the course of the yatra there was large scale violence, rioting and killings. Advani and his associates were finally stopped and arrested by the Lalu Prasad Yadav-led Bihar government in Samastipur in October 1990.Even after the arrest of Advani, thousands of kar sevaks managed to reach Ayodhya where 20 of them were killed after a clash with the police.Two years later, on December 6, 1992 the Babri Masjid was demolished by a mob of kar sevaks led by a coterie of BJP leaders, who in turn were led by Advani.
