‘Sabke Ram’ pitch to ‘Akshat’ campaign, Sangh Parivar steps up for Ayodhya Temple as BJP gets LS theme song

Sources in the RSS, however, say that the inauguration function would not be about Ayodhya alone, pointing out that the thrust of the Sangh Parivar’s preparations is “Sabke Ram (Ram belongs to all)”. As part of this exercise, the members of the Sangh and VHP, an affiliate of the RSS, will undertake a door-to-door campaign throughout the country from January 1 to January 15 for distribution of “Akshat (rice)”, which would be a symbolic invite for the people to organise gatherings in their own local temples on January 22 to mark the opening of the Ram Temple.

This outreach is not being mounted just across India but in foreign countries too, where the Sangh Parivar is also mobilising the Hindu communities to get them organise similar events in their localities on January 22.

“People are focusing on Ayodhya, but January 22 will be a much bigger programme on a national scale, with some events coming up across the globe. The local programmes that will happen in conjunction with the Ayodhya Pran Pratishtha will also go live online, giving the sense of the country and parts of the world acting in tandem with what is happening at Ayodhya,” an RSS insider told The Indian Express.

For the BJP, the inauguration of the Ram Temple will bring to fruition a major ideological cause that it had been championing for more than three decades. It was the Ram Temple movement led by Advani, which had fuelled the BJP’s rise as a leading contender for power at the national level, making it the principal challenger of the then dominant Congress.

The BJP camp feels that the Ayodhya event would send out a message in the run-up to the Lok Sabha polls that besides the abrogation of Article 370, which had granted special status to Kashmir, the Temple stands as another proof that the BJP has fulfilled what it promised to its core constituency despite vehement opposition from other parties.

During the Atal Behari Vajpayee era, when the BJP came to power leading a large NDA coalition stitched up by Vajpayee, who remained the PM from 1998 to 2004, the BJP had to put its Ram Temple demand along with its two other key ideological issues — Article 370 and Uniform Civil Code — on the back burner. It is much easier for the party — which has now been ruling the country by dint of its own majority in the Lok Sabha since 2014 — to claim credit for the Ram Temple coming up after the Supreme Court Constitution Bench cleared the decks for it through a unanimous judgment in November 2019.

The Temple may just be one of the issues that the BJP would highlight in its campaign for the Lok Sabha polls, slated for April-May 2024, but it has a “thematic link” with other issues, say party insiders. “The Temple is not just about clinching an ideological issue. It is also about telling people that the BJP delivers what it promises, unlike other parties. Be it giving free foodgrains to 81 crore people, ensuring Covid vaccination, or be it the Ram Temple finally becoming a reality or Article 370 becoming a thing of the past, multiple things add up in the minds of voters as ‘Modi’s guarantees’, which will always get fulfilled. This is the message that the party is delivering to voters everywhere,” said a BJP leader who did not wish to be named.