Ram temple to be ready by Jan 1, 2024, says Amit Shah

AGARTALA: The Ram temple in Ayodhya will be ready by January 1, 2024, Union home minister Amit Shah said Thursday in Tripura, indicating that BJP will begin its campaign for the general elections with the inauguration of the shrine.
“Congress hindered the construction of the Ram temple in courts. After the SC verdict, Modiji began its construction. Hopefully, the temple will be ready in a year and it will be open for the public at the beginning of 2024. The country is eagerly waiting for the Ram temple for many years, which will be over by January 1, 2024,” Shah said.

Shah flagged off an eight-day Jana Viswas Yatra in the northeastern state ahead of assembly polls due in February-March. BJP is looking to retain Tripura, where it won overwhelmingly in 2018 to end the CPM-led Left Front’s 25 years in office in the state.
Addressing a public rally in Sabroom in South Tripura, Shah said Congress and the communists had blocked the Ram temple court case since Independence.

“During the 2019 elections, people must have seen that even Rahul Baba taunted us with the ‘mandir wahi banayenge par wahi nahi batayenge’ slogan. But the Ram mandir is being built and on January 1, 2024, the temple will be ready,” he said. He appealed to the people of Tripura to visit the temple on that auspicious day. “Wait for one or two years, a magnificent temple of Maa Tripura Sundari will also be built and the entire world will visit it,” he said. “We have also built Kashi Vishwanath corridor, Mahakal corridor, Somnath and Ambe Mata temple are being made with gold, Maa Vindhyavasini temple is also being built. Today I met the Assam chief minister who told me that another magnificent temple of the Mother Goddess is being built there,” he said and asked if the communists would have built so many temples had they been in office. Praising CM Manik Saha, former CM Biplab Deb and deputy CM Jishnu Dev Barman for their work, Shah said: “This shows that the next government in Tripura will be formed by the BJP again.”This yatra will carry the message of people's trust that the BJP government has won.”
Shah recalled how only 11 people attended his rally in Tripura in 2018. “That day we decided that we will liberate Tripura from the clutches of communist misrule. We decided that we will uproot the communist rule. And I raised the slogan of chalo paltai (let’s change),” he said.
He also swiped at former PM Manmohan Singh. “There was a Congress-led government in India for 10 years. But you could see that infiltrators from Pakistan would come each day and kill people and leave. But they forgot that Mouni baba Manmohan Singh is no longer in power now. Modiji is India’s Prime Minister now. They launched an attack in Pulwama and Modiji within 10 days gave a befitting reply in the form of surgical strikes in which Indian forces blew enemy camps in Pakistan into pieces,” he said.
He said Congress and communists used to feed Article 370 like a kid, but the Modi government abolished it to ensure that Kashmir becomes an integral part of India for good.“We were told by Congress, communists, Samajwadi, Bahujan Samajwadi parties that blood will be shed on the streets of Kashmir if Article 370 was abrogated. But Rahul baba, three years have passed, no one even dared to throw a stone, let alone shed blood,” he said.