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AAP’s Hindutva politics
The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) supremo can defend himself by reading us the list of the 12 pilgrim sites that his government has identified for the followers of different faiths. But one cannot miss the significance of his move and his centre staging of Ayodhya. Ayodhya does have a place in the sacred geography of Hindus. It is called Ayodhyaji by the devotes. But it was not in the original list of the Delhi government, which had Puri, Rameswaram, Shirdi, Mathura, Haridwar, Kartarpur, the Golden Temple and Vaishno Devi. Ayodhya was added to it when Kejriwal and his colleagues returned from Uttar Pradesh after launching their campaign for the assembly elections due in that state in 2022.
As part of the campaign, they took out a Tiranaga yatra, to pay homage to the Ram Lalla virajman at Ayodhya. It was very clear from the move that AAP wanted to marry nationalism with the ideology of Hindutva which worked through the metaphor of the Ram temple – which is actually a victory memorial of an imagined war in which Muslims were trounced. Kejriwal put it upfront when he said that his darshan of Ram Lalla prompted him to add Ayodhya to the list. So, it is not Ayodhya in the traditional imagination but the Ayodhya which had displaced Faizabad that he wants his Hindu elderly to visit.
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https://thewire.in/politics/ayodhya-aap-arvind-kejriwal-hindutva-normalise
