Union minister says Bhojshala is temple

Lest anyone be in any doubt about her statement, she added that the name of the monument mentioned on the ASI entry tickets would be ‘‘corrected’’ and only Bhojshala mentioned. She, however, stopped short of saying that Muslims won’t be allowed to offer namaaz, saying that issue had to be studied.

The minister would have carried some credibility but for the ASI which has on several occasions said facts quite contrary to what she asserted. She took the tour with Uma Bharti who was here in course of her Sankalp Yatra. The move is clearly aimed at reviving a controversy that had virtually died down after an RSS-backed agitation in February had pressed the state and the Centre to allow the same rights of access to Hindus that the Muslims enjoyed to the monument.

BJP sources indicate that an apprehension within the state BJP that Digvijay Singh may be able to tide over the power crisis in the coming months is the reason for this attempt to resort to a plank that had earlier failed to find an echo in the state.

The biggest obstacle to the BJP campaign is a reply filed in 1998, with the Vajpayee government in place, on behalf of the Secretary, Department of Culture (now Chikalia’s ministry) and the ASI before the MP High Court on this very issue.

The reply is so damaging to the BJP claims the party’s state organising general secretary Kaptan Singh Solanki has demanded an inquiry into how it came to be filed. Today, Uma Bharti chose to state that the reply was not concerned with the Bhojshala itself but rather the dargah outside the monument.

That even this statement is a lie is borne out by the reply: ‘‘It is most humbly submitted that the factual identity of the present structure is not definitely known, nor can it be ascertained from the study of the structure itself…There is every possibility that the pillars and ceilings could have been gathered from demolished edifices around Dhar and being material readily available must have been put to use for the construction of the mosque of Kamal Maula…The actual location of the original Bhojshala remains a mystery which remains to be solved. It is reiterated most humbly that the structure, presently under dispute was declared protected as Bhojshala and Kamal Maula Mosque and so it remains protected till today…’’

Clearly the reply refers to the protected monument in question; in fact, the dargah referred to by Uma does not fall in the ASI’s jurisdiction at all. Pressed over and over again for evidence to back her claim, Chikalia said the motifs on the pillars and the shilalekh establish this, an assertion that the reply rebuts.

As for her claim that the Saraswati idol in London would be brought back and installed at this ‘mandir’, the ASI reply is telling: ‘‘It is submitted, that there is indeed an image of the female deity at the British Museum, but to lay claim and identify it as the very same image which was originally placed in the present structure cannot stand… In this matter, it is submitted that the famous Indian iconographists have yet to come on to a common platform about the true identify of the sculpture under question and there exists conflicting opinions appropos this sculpture’s identity, wherein one school of thought considers it as Vagdevi (Saraswati) while the other school thinks it to be that of a Jain Yakshi Ambika…It is submitted that even this information provided…does not state in its absolute clarity that the sculpture was discovered from the present structure, but on the contrary the informations states that the image was discovered from the ruins adjoining the Bhojshala at Dhar.’’