In an interaction at his office in Baharat Kuti at Karsevakpuram in Ayodhya , Rai, who is cognisant of the extremely short deadline he has to meet spoke to Hindustan Times on his memories of Ram Mandir movement and the Ram Mandir project itself.
All credit for construction of Ram Mandir goes to sadhus and people of Ayodhya. They were the ones who were at the forefront of all Ram Mandir movements.Right from December 22, 1949, when sadhus broke into the Ram Janmabhoomi ( then a mosque) to capture it; the November 9, 1989 shilanyas; the October 30-November 2 1990 firing on karsevaks; December 6, 1992 (demolition of structure); and till date -- the people of Ayodhya have been at the forefront of the temple movement. Outsiders came and left Ayodhya during the temple movement. But without the support and active participation of sadhus and the people of Ayodhya, the Ram Mandir movement could have never succeeded. All credit for construction of Ram Mandir at Ram Janmabhoomi in Ayodhya goes to the people of Ayodhya.
No date has been finalised yet. But the grand ceremony will take place on any day between Makar Sankranti on January 15 and January 24. The ceremony will not take place before Makar Sankranti due to Hindu belief and after January 25 as PM Narendra Modi will be occupied with Republic Day celebrations.
No. It is not possible to invite everyone for the ceremony. We have our compulsions and limitations that restrict us .Everyone wants to come to Ayodhya to be a part of the grand ceremony. But this is not possible.
The Directorate of Teacher Education and SCERT came into existence as an independent Directorate on January 15, 1990. It progressively acquired its present status from the State Institute of Education, established in 1964 to State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) in 1979, and from SCERT to TE and SCERT in 1990.
Its progressive evolution from SIE to TE and SCERT was largely mandated by ever expanding and emerging developments in education.
Violence was not just a marginal phenomenon, a sudden and spontaneous communal frenzy that accompanied Partition. It was on the contrary at the very heart of the event. Nor was it merely a consequence of Partition but rather the principal mechanism for creating the conditions for Partition. Violence constituted the moral instrument through which the tension between the pre-Partition local character of identity and its postcolonial territorial and national redefinition was negotiated (Gilmartin, 1998: 1069-1089). Violence operated as the link between the community and its new national territory. That is precisely what gave it its organized and genocidal dimension as it was meant for control of social space so as to cleanse these territories from the presence of other religious communities (Hansen, 2002).
Violence first erupted in Calcutta, Bengal, on August 16, 1946, one year before Independence. It then spread in the rest of the province, especially in Noakhali on October 1946, as well as in Bihar. It subsequently receded but then peaked again in March 1947, this time in Punjab, which was to become the epicenter of Partition violence. The hastily announcement on June 3, 1947, of the Partition Plan by Lord Mountbatten, which officialized the territorial partition of the British Raj on August 15, 1947, triggered unprecedented acts of communal violence, especially in the two Muslim majority provinces Bengal and Punjab that were to be divided. Communal violence climaxed between August 13 and 19, just before and after the Independence and the release of the Boundary Award. During the night of August 14 to 15, Pakistan and India became independent Nation States due to the dismantlement of the British Raj. The exact layout of the international border that was to divide Punjab between India and Pakistan was still not known at the time of Independence. It is only on August 16, 1947, that the Punjab Boundary Award was finally made public. This further aggravated the communal violence. During the following months until October 1947, the province of Punjab was the scene of numerous mass killings between Hindus and Sikhs on the one side, and Muslims on the other side.
1946; October 10, The Noakhali Anti-Hindu Massacre: Retaliatory violence against Hindus then spread in Noakhali district and in some parts of the adjacent Tripura district. The majority of the population in the area was Muslim, around 82%, while most of the land belonged to Hindu landlords. As a consequence of the riots in Calcutta, a massive anti-Hindu pogrom was organized by Muslim locals so as to cleanse the region from Hindu presence either by killing them or by forcing them to flee the area. The death toll is close to 5,000 dead according to the press (Sengupta, 2007: 138), though Moon considered that it should rather be counted in hundreds (Moon, 1998: 59). It is claimed that nearly 75% of Hindus previously in the area left the place. ** (Sengupta, 2007; Moon, 1998).
1947; The Bihar Anti-Muslim Riots: The cycle of retributive violence went on in Bihar where anti-Muslim riots broke out at the beginning of 1947. The constant flux of non-Muslims refugees from Bengal to Bihar and the news they propagated, especially of killings of Hindu Biharis in Calcutta and Noakhali, propelled armed bands of Hindus to attack Muslim villages in the Bihar countryside as acts of revenge. Village after village were looted and burnt and their population killed, resulting in the death of thousands of Muslims in the province by armed groups of Hindus. ** (Sengupta, 2007: 143).
At the time of Independence, the State of Pakistan was composed of two wings, namely West and East Pakistan, separated by more than 1200 miles of Indian territory. Although the two wings were linked by religion, they differed strongly from an ethnic and linguistic point of view. Whereas East Pakistan was constituted of a homogeneous Bengali-speaking population, West Pakistan was divided between Punjabis, Pathans, Sindhis and Baluchis. Moreover, Bengalis formed the majority of the population, around 56%, all of them concentrated in East Pakistan. The Pakistani federal system was excessively centralized to the detriment of the provinces. Economic and political power was concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite from West Pakistan. Bengalis were hardly represented in the army and the bureaucracy. All the natural resources located in East Pakistan, such as jute for example, were exploited by the western wing and the wealth hence created was not redistributed to the eastern wing. The situation was felt by East Pakistanis as a form of internal colonization. In East Pakistan, it soon propelled a demand for more provincial autonomy which initially crystallized, around 1952, on the question of language, particularly the status of Bengali, which, despite being the most spoken language in the country, was not recognized as a national language besides Urdu.
The assessment of the death toll and the qualification of the violence still remain, thirty-six years after the events, the object of a bitter controversy. The estimates of the death toll vary tremendously. Most of them oscillated between 300,000 (Sisson and Rose, 1990) and 3 millions (Muhit, 1992; Jahan, 1997), to what is added between 200,000 and 400,000 women raped (Brownmiller, 1975). According to the Bangladesh authorities, the Pakistan army was responsible for killing three million Bengalis and raping at least 200,000 East Pakistani women. The Martial Law administration put the death toll around 26,000 Bengalis and accused the Bengali insurgents of killing 100,000 non-Bengalis (Hamoodur Rahman Report, 1974). Both these propagandist estimations are obviously flawed respectively by excess and by default. The controversy over the death toll is due to the partisan character of the allegations made by the Bangladeshi and the Indian governments, on the one hand, and the Pakistani government, on the other. Besides, the press restrictions and the censorship during the events contributed to blur information. According to R.J. Rummel, the death toll would be approximately 1,500,000 Bengalis and 150,000 non-Bengalis, to what must be added 10,000,000 refugees who had fled to India (Rummel, 1994: 331). Regarding the number of women raped, there is also a polemic as some argued that the number of women raped should be counted in thousands and not in hundred thousands (Bose, 2007: 3864).
_ The final and overall responsibility for the atrocities was attributed by the Hamoodur Commission to officers from the Pakistan army such as General Yahya Khan, Lt. Gen. Pirzada, Maj Gen. Umar, and Lt. Gen. Mitha, while the immediate responsibility for executing the plan fell on Lt. Gen. Tikka Khan and Lt. Gen. A.A.K. Niazi. The Pakistani army is accused:
-* of killing Bengali officers and men of the units of the East Bengal Regiment, East Pakistan Rifles, and the East Pakistan Police Force on pretence of quelling their rebellion and in the process of disarming them; of killing East Pakistani civilian officers, businessmen and industrialists;
-* and of deliberate killings of members of the Hindu minority (Hamoodur Rahman Report, 1974: 19). Besides the Pakistani army, other actors have also perpetrated various atrocities and killings, especially the Awami League-backed Bengali liberation army, the Mukhti Bahini, which targeted pro-Pakistan elements such as West Pakistanis, Biharis and also pro-Pakistan Bengalis.
1952; January 26: The Basic Principle Committee of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan recommended that Urdu should be the only State language, hence following the position of all the national leaders such as Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Liaquat Ali Khan and Khawja Nazimuddin since Independence. Two days later, students of Dhaka University held a protest meeting and demanded the resignation of Prime Minister Nazimuddin who, despite his own Bengali origin, refused to support the demand for Bengali as the second national language along with Urdu, and the State language of East Pakistan.
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