Congress asks Advani, BJP not to reopen Ayodhya wounds

NEW DELHI - The Congress Saturday expressed hope that veteran leader L.K. Advani or his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would not re-start the Ayodhya movement that created a communal divide in the country.

Calling Advani as the ‘Bhishma Pitamah’ of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), Congress spokesman Manish Tewari said the saffron leader’s controversial rath yatra from Gujarat’s Somnath to Ayodhya 20 years ago had impacted the country’s secularism.

“Pitamah of National Democratic Alliance… With wisdom of hindsight, I do hope that neither Advani nor his party does anything which impacts India’s pluralism and secularism or in any manner reopens any of the old wounds which have taken a long time to heal,” Tewari told reporters here on the very day when Advani visited Somnath to mark the anniversary of the 1990 rath yatra.

“The implications of that yatra, the communal conflagration it unleashed, the wounds it opened… The nation has barely been able to surmount it,” Tewari said.

Earlier in the day, Advani, who visited the Somnath temple in Gujarat along with former party leader Uma Bharti, urged the Supreme Court to allow the Allahabad High Court to deliver the Ayodhya verdict. He said people had been waiting for a judgment in the case for over five decades.

Advani said he was not able to understand the apex court’s decision to grant interim stay till Sep 28 on the verdict. The high court was earlier scheduled to deliver its verdict on the Babri Masjid-Ramjanmabhoomi title suit Sep 24.

“I appeal to the Supreme Court that the countrymen have been waiting for the judgment in the case for the last 50 years. I urge the court to take up the matter on Sep 28 and get the judgment delivered through this bench (of the Allahabad High Court),” Advani told reporters.