It was the year 1996. Hyderabad was the city. The then CM Chandrababu Naidu was on a Hyderabad beautification spree. One of the main items on his agenda was road widening. Too many encroachments and the roads had become too narrow for the growing volume of traffic. If he wanted investment to come into Hyderabad he had to make the infrastructure attractive and make it easier for people to move around within the city.
During his road widening spree, there was one thing that he religiously followed. He would go around demolishing everything in the way of his proposed wide road except places of religious worship. It could be a temple, mosque, church or a gurudwara, he would just leave alone that area of the road that’s covered by the structure and convert it into a roundabout. He did that to respect the beliefs and sentiments of the religions involved. He did not want to arouse riots in the city because of relocating a structure of religous belief. He never thought about demolishing any of them.
I only wonder why our central Government cannot have an ounce of sense while deciding to go ahead in demolishing the Rama Sethu (Adam’s Bridge)! It is connected too deeply to the sentiments of the Hindu religion. It is considered to be the bridge built by the vanarasena for Rama to cross over the sea to Lanka to bring back his kidnapped wife Sita.
Now questions like: Whether the bridge was really built by man or not? (Technically, the question should be ‘whether the bridge was really built by monkeys or not?’) OR Whether Rama existed or not? OR any other such inane question is irrelevant. Rama is a Hindu God and he needs to be respected for it. If there is something in this world that can be connected to people’s faith about Rama then it needs to be respected. You cannot go and demolish it straightaway. Apart from the sentiments, faith and belief of the Hindus, you also need to consider various other points.
In my opinion, the Government would be committing political harakiri by going ahead with the demolition. Even the US wants to preserve the Rama Sethu. [Link] And TN CM Karunanidhi (He leads a party called DMK that’s a part of the coalition government at the centre) isn’t quite helping matters by releasing statements like these. “Who’s Ram?”, he asks. Hey Ram!