Travelling 1,000 kilometres over a week, carted on trucks, worshipped by devotees along the way, and guarded by police personnel, two 'Shaligram' stones weighing 31 tonnes and 15 tonnes each reached Ayodhya on Thursday. With that, one more step was completed on the road to the Ram temple at Ayodhya which, the Modi government has declared, would be ready come January next year, and where work is on day and night to meet the deadline. The shaligram stone, collected from the riverbed or banks of a tributary of the Gandaki river in Nepal, is revered as a representation of Lord Vishnu by Hindu devotees. Hence the long journey from Galeshwar Dham in Janakpur, 100 km from Pokhara in Nepal, with the two massive stones, which could be used in the making of the Ram lalla idol. Priests of the Janaki Temple in Janakpur, including chief priest Ram Tapeshwar Das, former deputy prime minister of Nepal Bimalendra Nidhi, and around 150 delegates set off on Basant Panchami, which fell on January 26. A poster in the front of the trucks read 'Shila Shobha Yatra', and the cavalcade included motorcycles and cars. VHP national secretary Rajendra Singh Pankaj was also part of the delegation. The Nepal Police guarded the stones till the two trucks carrying them crossed the border. The Bihar Police took over next, followed by the Uttar Pradesh Police, which escorted the trucks to Ramsevakpuram, located at the centre of Ayodhya, where work for the temple is on. Enroute, as in Ayodhya, people lined the streets to welcome the stones, offering flowers and prayers, and bursting firecrackers. A trust functionary said emotional scenes were witnessed in Mithilanchal, Bihar, as the cavalcade passed. "Everyone kept touching the stones. We asked the reason. They replied that they believed that after the Treta Yuga, Sita was leaving Mithila with her husband once again, believing that one stone would be used to make the idol of Sita and the other of Ram,” said the functionary. On Thursday, as the Nepal delegation formally handed over the stones to office-bearers of the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust, 51 priests offered prayers and hundreds of devotees joined in to mark the occasion. The general secretary of the trust, which was set up by the Centre to oversee the construction of the temple, Champat Rai, received the stones along with trust member Anil Mishra. “Feeling happy with the unwavering devotion and faith of all the Rambhakts,” Rai tweeted in Hindi. VHP leader Rajendra Singh Pankaj told The Indian Express that the Janaki temple had offered the Shaligram stones as a gift and borne the transportation cost. A “Ram Baraaat” is taken from Ayodhya to the Janaki temple every five years, he said, and returns with clothes, sweets and fruits as gifts. This time “Ram vivah (wedding)” was on November 28 and “they offered to give Shaligram shilas for the Ram lalla idol”, Pankaj said. The VHP leader added that the trust had been thinking of using the Shaligram stone for a long time to make the idol of Ram as Ram was an incarnation of Vishnu. “So when Janaki temple authorities offered the same, the trust gave its consent.” Pankaj added that devotees and local residents had gathered all along the route from Nepal to Ayodhya by the roadside, even at nights, to welcome the stones. Even when the cavalcade halted for the night, the stones were never out of sight of police personnel. While Mishra said no decision had been taken yet on how the stones would be used, the priests of the Janaki temple are believed to have expressed a wish that these stones be used for making the idol of Lord Ram. Union Home Minister Amit Shah announced recently that the Ram temple would be ready on January 1, 2024. On the ground, over 550 people are deployed in two shifts, day and night, to ensure that the main sanctum sanctorum of the temple is completed by October this year, and the Lord Ram idol installed between December 21, 2023, and January 14, 2024. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had laid the foundation stone of the temple in August 2020.
