As the date of the Ram Mandir Bhoomi Poojan draws closer, politicians are making what are looking like increasingly desperate attempts to try to somehow throw a spanner in the works of the proceedings.
Today, AIMIM leader Asaduddin Owaisi hinted that PM Modi shouldn’t attend the Bhoomi Poojan of the temple, given how he heads a secular state. “Attending Bhumi Pujan in official capacity will be a violation of @PMOIndia‘s constitutional oath. Secularism is part of the Basic Structure of Constitution,” he tweeted. He also hinted that the the PM shouldn’t attend the ceremony because of the contentious history of the temple. “We can’t forget that for over 400 years Babri stood in Ayodhya & it was demolished by a criminal mob in 1992,” he added.
Owaisi seemed to be saying that an Indian Prime Minister shouldn’t attend a ceremony to inaugurate the construction of a temple because he was under constitutional oath, and secularism was a part of the basic structure of the constitution. But Owaisi might’ve himself fallen afoul of the high standards of secularism that he seems to uphold.
Just last year, Asaduddin Owaisi had inaugurated the Masjid-e-Saleha Hafeez at Madannapet in Hyderabad. “AIMIM chief and Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi, along with party general secretary and Yakutpura MLA Syed Ahmed Pasha Quadri, inaugurated the Masjid-e-Saleha Hafeez at Madannapet in Santosh Nagar on Wednesday,” says a Hans India news report from 14th November 2019. The report also has a picture of Owaisi at the inauguration. At that time, Asaduddin Owaisi was the MP from Hyderabad.
Owaisi seems to be saying that because the Prime Minister is under oath of a “secular” constitution, he shouldn’t be inaugurating a religious structure. But by the same standards, at that time Owaisi was under oath as an MP under the same constitution, and had inaugurated a mosque. But to expect consistency from opposition politicians at this point might just be futile — over the last 6 years, as the Modi government has gone from strength to strength, the attacks appear to have become more and more ludicrous.
