Yogi allots land for mosque outside Ayodhya city to please RSS and VHP

The fear of the Muslims proved to be true. The Yogi Government in Uttar Pradesh allotted a land for construction of Mosque outside Ayodhya city – which is in fact 25 kms away from the place where the proposed Ram Temple is likely to come up.

Haji Mehboob, one of the litigants of the title Ayodhya suit said that this decision of the state government to give 5 acre of land in Dhannipur village is unjustified. It is too far from Ayodhya city. “Who will go there to offer namaz,” he told this reporter from Ayodhya.

Khaliq Ahmad Khan, who is a nominee of the litigant Maulana Mahofoozurahman said the government should have allotted a land in Ayodhya city. “We always feared that government will willfully allot land for construction of Ram Temple away from the Ayodhya city and our fear proved true,” he said.

On Wednesday the Uttar Pradesh government allotted five acres of land on the fringes of Ayodhya district to Sunni Waqf Board for the construction of a mosque as per the direction of the Supreme Court. The government spokesperson and Energy minister Srikant Sharma said that five acres of land at Dhanipur village in Sohawal tehsil on Lucknow -Ayodhya highway would be allotted for building the mosque in Ayodhya.

There are several reasons for Dhanipur being selected as the place to construct the Mosque. The biggest reason is that it is outside the panch kosi parikrama and 14 kosi parikrama route. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad had always been demanding that mosque site should be outside Parikrama route.

An official who is in the know of things about selection of mosque land says that initially the administration had identified three lands near Ayodhya for the construction of mosque; these being near Faizabad-Azamgarh, Ayodhya-Basti and Lucknow-Ayodhya highways. As the first two sites were near Parikrama route the administration opted for Dhanipur.

“Another reason for this site selection is its proximity to highway, a mix population and a history of communal harmony in the region,” he said.

There was always a fear that UP Government would allot a land outside Ayodhya city for the construction of mosque as the Supreme Court has failed to specify whether five acre land to Muslims would be given in Ayodhya town or Ayodhya district.

In its land mark Ayodhya verdict on November 9 the Supreme Court had ordered that five acre of land should be handed over to the Sunni Central Waqf Board “either from the acquired 67 acres or elsewhere in Ayodhya”.

The order says: “The land shall be allotted either by: (a) The central government out of the land acquired under the Ayodhya Act 1993; or (b) The state government at a suitable prominent place in Ayodhya,”

Muslims believe that in the absence of clarity in the order whether land would be given in Ayodhya city area or in Ayodhya district the Yogi government played foul. “Till November 2018 Ayodhya and Faizabad were different. The word Ayodhya meant Ayodhya city area while Faizabad represented the whole district of which Ayodhya was a part. After Yogi Government renamed Faizabad into Ayodhya, the word Ayodhya now means the whole district,” Syed Sadiq Ahmad, a Muslim scholar said in Lucknow.

He said that in this scenario, the Government allotted land at the border of Ayodhya saying it had followed the order of Supreme Court. “The RSS and its frontal organizations had already advocated that the Mosque should be built across Saryu. The right wing organizations say that no mosque should come up in the periphery of Ram Janmabhoomi. The Yogi government has used the SC order to fulfill RSS design,” he said.