Few people other than Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) supremo Mohan Bhagwat, and Champat Rai can claim to be closely associated with the new Ram temple at Ayodhya.
Others like former Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders LK Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Sadhvi Ritambhara, and Uma Bharti, and even Bajrang Dal’s Vinay Katiyar—pioneers of the majoritarian mobilisation in the 1980s and 1990s—were sidelined. Their decades of service to the cause of creating a Hindu votebank through the Ram temple movement has been perfunctorily acknowledged but consigned to history’s ‘thanda basta’ or cold storage. The script for the new phase of the BJP has these once heavyweights consigned to political footnotes.
Sometimes, however, there is no irony in the inevitable. The sordid and still unravelling controversy of a cash and jewellery loot at the grandest Hindu temple in the world must come as more than a temporary nuisance even for the best media managers of the BJP.