Guntur: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party have taken strong exception to what they claim to be the illegal installation of a Holy Cross at Edalapadu in Guntur district, where the footprints of Sita were once present.
The Andhra Pradesh Unit of the BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) have alleged that this was happening with the support of the local administration and the state government.
In New Delhi, Sunil Deodhar, BJP’s national secretary and co-in-charge of Andhra Pradesh (AP), today alleged that the Andhra Pradesh government was “in silent support with Christian missionaries in destroying Hindu cultural symbols”. He said: “Here the carving of Lord Narasimha is present on the back. The state BJP unit and the RSS are protesting but the administration is still strongly supporting the Christian missionaries who want to erase the symbols of Hindu culture and heritage.”
Deodhar in a tweet also claimed that Hindus used to perform marriage ceremonies at the site of Sita Paduka (footprints of Sita), but gradually, Christians came there and started claiming that the hill belonged to Mother Mary. He went on to allege that a top district official who is a Christian had been supporting the missionaries by ignoring the objections made by the BJP and the RSS.
“Christian evangelists plan to convert the site next to a highway into a pilgrimage site,” he claimed and further charged that there were increasing instances of Christian conversion activities in the state. and the attack on AP’s Hindu temples is causing serious concern among the people. He pointed out that a Rama idol was desecrated in the 1,500 years old Ramateertham Sita Lakshman Kodandaram temple in the Vizianagaram district of AP. The acts of vandalism at the temple had occurred on December 29, a day before surveillance cameras were to be installed at the temple. Following this former Union Minister Pusapati Ashok Gajapati Raju, a scion of Royal family of Vizayanagram princely state , was was removed by the state government as the chairman of three temple trusts in the Vizianagaram and East Godavari districts by the Andhra Pradesh government on January 2, 2021, via a memo, for allegedly failing to take steps that might have prevented the vandalism of the idol of Rama at the Ramatheertham temple. However, in a legal blow to the Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy-led state government, the Andhra Pradesh High Court set aside Raju’s removal on January 29.
It may be mentioned that since March last year, several Hindu idols in temples around the State had been vandalised and desecrated by unknown miscreants, that snowballed into a political issue for Andhra Pradesh’s three main political rivals, the BJP, the Telugu Desam Party (of which Raju is a member) and the ruling Yuvajana Sramika Rythu Congress (YSRC). Following the continued acts of vandalism, the state government had increased security at temples by installing 37,673 surveillance cameras at 11,295 places of worship in the State.
