'Taking up responsibility of a pujari': Sharad Pawar's dig at Amit Shah over Ram mandir date

New Delhi: Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar on Sunday (January 8, 2023) took a "pujari" dig at Union Home Minister Amit Shah for announcing that the Ram temple in Ayodhya will be ready by January 1, 2024, and said that it would have been better if temple's priest had said this. The former Union Minister also wondered whether the temple issue pertains to Shah and claimed that the matter is being raised to divert attention from real issues.

"I am not sure whether this issue (Ram Mandir opening date) pertains to the Union home minister. Had Ram Mandir's pujari (priest) said this then it would have been better, but there is no objection if he (Shah) is taking up the responsibility of the pujari," he told reporters.

"Issues like Ram Mandir are being raised to divert real issues," Pawar added. 

Earlier last week, Shah, while addressing a rally in poll-bound Tripura, said that the Ram temple will be ready by next January, the year when the Lok Sabha elections will be held.

The move is being seen by BJP's political opponents as an indication that Ram Mandir, a plank raked up by the saffron camp since 1990 when its leader LK Advani started out on a Rath Yatra to focus on the issue, may again be one of the cornerstones of the ruling party's campaign in the upcoming general election.

It is notable that Advani's Rath Yatra was believed a major factor in the rise of the BJP in the 1990s, which had been politically hit by both the advent of Rajiv Gandhi in 1984 and the Mandal Commission award in the late 1980s.

The Rath Yatra had also witnessed the spawning of a movement calling for the destruction of the 16th-century Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, which some believed was the site of a palace where Lord Ram was born. It culminated in the public destruction of the mosque by saffron brigade volunteers in December 1992.