New Delhi, Oct. 10 :
New Delhi, Oct. 10:
Just ahead of the Uttar Pradesh polls, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee has put the Ramjanmabhoomi issue back on the political centrestage.
Vajpayee yesterday assured Vishwa Hindu Parishad leaders he would soon revive the high-level Ayodhya cell and do 'everything' to 'resolve' the matter by March 2002.
The promises came during an hour-long meeting he had with VHP International president Ashok Singhal and Mahant Ram Chander Das Parmahans, chief of the Ramjanmabhoomi Nyas, a specially constituted trust to look after the building of the Ram temple.
The Ayodhya cell, first created by V.P. Singh in 1989, used to monitor negotiations between the Centre and representatives of the organisations involved in the mandir-masjid dispute as well as the court proceedings. The cell existed through the successive Chandra Shekhar and P.V. Narasimha Rao governments but became defunct once the Babri masjid was demolished in December 1992.
Singhal and Parmahans today jointly addressed a news conference. Parmahans, who heads the important Digambar Akhara (a religious order) of Ayodhya, said: 'Atalji said the cell will be reconstituted very soon and will be directly under his charge.'
Official sources, however, said the cell would take shape in a couple of days and would be part of the Cabinet secretariat and not the Prime Minister's Office (PMO). Sources also said it would be headed by a retired or serving IAS official, preferably from Uttar Pradesh, who is conversant with the dispute dating back to several decades.
The two leaders also impressed on Vajpayee that the Centre should immediately hand over the land on the periphery of the disputed site so that the Nyas could begin building the four
gopurams (domes).
'We told the Prime Minister that while we do not expect you to do anything improper, you should return the undisputed parts of the land to us. Nobody has any objection to this and from the legal point of view, too, it should be returned to us,' Parmahans said.
Vajpayee's response, he said, was he would 'solve' the problem. 'When I asked him how, he said 'I will first reactivate the Ayodhya cell in 10 or 12 days',' the mahant said. He, however, cautioned Vajpayee against using it to 'break the mandir movement'.
Asked if the Prime Minister indicated any other way of settling the matter, Singhal said: 'He had emphatically stated earlier to the Lucknow press, Parliament and yesterday us that he would do it. Surely, he must have said all this on the basis of something concrete. He knows when he should observe silence and when to break it.'