Ayodhya, Feb. 7: Standing barely 6 km from the ruins of the Babri Masjid, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee chose to play his party’s signature temple tune before the new “feel-good” sonata.

Vajpayee claimed that the BJP was committed to building a Ram temple at Ayodhya, tugging at the heartstrings of the saffron-smattered crowd to seek a fresh mandate.

“Adhure kamon ko pura karne ke liye, naye kamon ko shuru karne ke liye, hume paanch saal aur dijiye… Abhi Ram mandir ki nirman ka karya bhi adhura hain (Give us five more years to complete unfinished tasks and take up new projects. The task of constructing the Ram temple also remains unfulfilled),” Vajpayee said, as over five lakh people, including hundreds of sadhus in saffron and officials of the Ayodhya temple trust, roared in approval and blew conch shells.

He laid out a roadmap for a solution of the mandir-masjid issue, saying there are only two ways to go about it.

“One is to wait for the court judgment. It is a long route to the solution of the problem. The other is negotiation. It has to be solved through discussions, understanding and cooperation,” Vajpayee said.

“Hum is mudde ka rajnitik labh uthana nahin chahte hai (We don’t want to derive political mileage out of the issue),” the Prime Minister told the rally, the first he was addressing at the temple-town in 13 years. He appealed that all obstacles on the path of the temple should be removed.

Earlier, Vajpayee inaugurated a bridge on the Saryu and took a ride on a special saloon — an armoured coach — on a new 8-km stretch from Katra to Faizabad.

This was the first train journey undertaken by a Prime Minister after Indira Gandhi travelled from Chandigarh to New Delhi in the early 1980s.

The tone for the rally at the Raj airstrip in Faizabad, Ayodhya’s twin town, was set in the morning, when Vajpayee told reporters at Lucknow airport: “Did we ever say the temple issue has been abandoned?”

Moreover, the return of Kalyan Singh, considered an architect of the mandir movement, to the BJP signalled that the issue would generate as much, if not more, sound bites as the “feel-good” factor, at least in Uttar Pradesh.

Sitting to Vajpayee’s right on the podium, Kalyan said the temple would be high on the BJP’s agenda. “With nation-building, temple reconstruction will have to be taken up…,” Kalyan said.

As in his recent rallies, Vajpayee went on to give a rundown of his government’s achievements, speaking of road construction, rural road projects, a river-linking system to resolve the irrigation problem and providing rice at Rs 3 per kg. “I will turn India into a powerful nation by 2020,” he said.

Referring to his peace initiative, Vajpayee said he convinced the Pakistani leadership that there was no use wasting money and resources in fighting wars. “I told them (Pakistan) that we have fought three wars and that they have been at the receiving end every time. They lost Bangladesh, we were able to take back Kargil and also safeguard our borders,” he said.

He also took a dig at Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, saying his government’s achievements in the economic field were not “Mungeri Lal ke haseen sapne”, as the Opposition leader had described Vajpayee’s claim of achieving 8 per cent growth rate.

“I do dream. I also know how to turn this dream into a reality,” he said.