9 Feb : After raking up the Ayodhya Ram temple issue at its party National Executive meeting, BJP seemed to have taken up a damage control exercise saying that though the issue would be a poll plank the party may not put it in its election manifesto.
"Building a Ram temple at Ayodhya is a political resolve on a political platform but may not be on the political manifesto of the party," BJP spokesperson Rajiv Pratap Rudy told reporters at New Delhi on Monday.
However, party sources said BJP’s Election Manifesto Committee, headed by senior leader Murli Manohar Joshi, would take a final call on the issue.
BJP’s alliance partners in the NDA are opposed to the saffron party’s stand on the Ram temple at Ayodhya, scrapping of Article 370 which gives special status to Jammu and Kashmir, and imposition of a Uniform Civil Code.
Hence, these issues find no mention in NDA’s Common Minimum Programme.Reacting to a statement of CPI(M) leader Sitaram Yechury that BJP was playing politics over the Ram temple issue, Rudy said, "That Sitaram is worried about Lord Ram is good news. We are still determined to build the Ram temple at Ayodhya. This is our political resolve."
He added that if Congress and RJD chief Lalu Prasad were "so pained" about the Ram temple issue they should help in building it.Rudy said BJP is committed to building the Ram temple at Ayodhya once it gets "absolute majority" in the Lok Sabha.BJP said though the Ayodhya Ram temple case was pending in the Supreme Court, the party was free to discuss it politically.The saffron party had brought up this issue during the two-day national executive at Nagpur. Party president Rajnath Singh had said nobody could shake the BJP’s resolve to build a grand temple at Ayodhya.
Later during the meet, BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate L K Advani stated that his party never gave up Ram and could truly say "Jai Shri Ram" only after building a magnificent Ram temple at the place where only a makeshift structure existed.
Interestingly, the Ram temple issue did not figure in the written text of the speeches of Rajnath and Advani.BJP may follow this practice in the party manifesto, too, by not mentioning it but raking it up during the election campaign.