Bengaluru, Dec 22: The VHP will rope in over five lakh volunteers to start a door-to-door fundraising drive in Karnataka from January 15 to February 27 next year to build a grand Sri Ram Temple in Ayodhya, the outfit's international working president Alok Kumar said on Tuesday.
Addressing reporters here, he said, "We are going to form a lakh groups comprising volunteers will go to 27,500 villages in the state and will be able to contact 90 lakh 'devotees' for obtaining the 'Nidhi Samarpan' (fund for temple)."
Laying out plans for fundraising, Kumar said a committee called Sri Ram Mandir Nidhi Samarpan Abhiyan Samiti has been formed in the state to oversee the fund collection drive.
According to Kumar, RSS functionary N Thippeswamy will be the secretary of the Karnataka Samiti.
There will be a committee of saints to guide the Samiti.
Kumar further said the fund would be collected through tokens of Rs 10, Rs 100, Rs 1,000.
For those who donate more than Rs 2,000 there will be a receipt.
These donations will be exempted under 80G of the Income Tax Act.
The VHP president said every group will consist of five persons who will hand over money to the depositor, who will deposit the entire money within 48 hours in designated bank accounts.
"Every depositor will have a registered code number at the nearest branch of one of the three banks namely State Bank of India, Bank of Baroda and Punjab National Bank.
Full transparency would be maintained in the collection," he added.
On the temple project, Kumar said Larsen and Toubro is building the temple on a turn-key basis whereas Tata Consultancy would be the engineers for the construction.
He noted that there was a challenge facing the engineers as the temple was coming up adjacent to the perennial Sarayu river and there is sand to the depth of 60 to 70 ft.
The three-storey stone structure with an estimated life of 1,000 years will be built without using cement and iron rods.
"For the stability of the structure, engineers from IIT Mumbai, IIT Delhi, IIT Chennai, IIT Guwahati, CBRI Roorkee, Larsen & Toubro are working on the foundation drawing," he explained.
According to him, the temple made of stone blocks would have a total area of 2.7 acres.
The construction area is 57,400 sq. ft. The length of the shrine would be 360 feet with 235 feet.
It would be a three-storied structure with 5 mandaps.
It is expected that by 2024 Shri Ram Lala, the idol of Lord Rama, shall be established in the sanctum sanctorum of the main temple.
Along with the temple, there will be several other projects spread over 108 acres, Kumar said adding that all of them will be of world standard and marvellous in all aspects.
He underlined that the VHP does not consider it as yet another temple but a medium of social, religious and spiritual rejuvenation.
"We want to abolish all the differences related to caste, region and linguistics with this temple to build a harmonious society...," Kumar said.
He added that the VHP will not be collecting money from any government, municipal corporation or any public body.
Observing that funds will be collected from the Hindu community, he appealed to the people to donate generously.
"We will heartily accept a charity of even Rs 10 and Rs 100," the VHP president said.
On August 5, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had performed the 'bhoomi pujan' of a Supreme Court-mandated Ram temple in Ayodhya, bringing to fruition the BJP's 'mandir' movement that defined its politics for three decades and took it to the heights of power.
On November 9, 2019, the SC settled the fractious issue going back more than a century and backed the construction of a Ram temple by a trust at the disputed site.
It also ruled that an alternative five-acre plot must be found for a mosque in the Hindu holy town.
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Lucknow (PTI): Mukhtar Ansari was subjected to slow poisoning in jail, Umar Ansari, the son of the gangster-turned-politician who died of cardiac arrest at a hospital in Uttar Pradesh's Banda, alleged early Friday.
The charge has been denied by authorities.
Mukhtar Ansari was brought to the Rani Durgavati Medical College in Banda from the district jail in "an unconscious state" and, according to its principal Suneel Kaushal, he died at the hospital following cardiac arrest on Thursday.
The 63-year-old was a five-time MLA from Mau Sadar. He had been behind bars in Uttar Pradesh and Punjab since 2005. He had over 60 criminal cases pending against him.
Mukhtar Ansari was sentenced in eight cases since September 2022 by different courts in Uttar Pradesh and was lodged in the Banda jail. His name was on the list of 66 gangsters issued by Uttar Pradesh Police last year.
"My father had told us he was being subjected to 'slow poison'," Umar Ansari told reporters and added that the entire country knows about it now.
Mukhtar Ansari's brother and Ghazipur MP Afzal Ansari had on Tuesday alleged that he was being subjected to "slow poisoning" in jail.
On Friday morning, people had gathered at the Mukhtar Ansari's residence. There was a large deployment of security personnel around the house as well as the hospital.
"We don't have any information about when the postmortem will be done. We were hoping that the postmortem would be done in the night itself and the body would be handed over to us in the morning. I don't understand why the administration is delaying it," Sibgatullah Ansari, Mukhtar Ansari's elder brother, told reporters.
When asked about the charges of "slow poisoning" levelled by Umar Ansari, he said, "...Mukhtar Ansari had informed the court through his lawyers in writing that these things are happening."
Prohibitory orders under Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC), which bars large gatherings, have been imposed across the state and additional security personnel deployed in the Banda, Mau, Ghazipur and Varanasi districts.
Mukhtar Ansari, who hailed from Mau, was believed to have a strong influence in the adjoining Ghazipur and Varanasi districts as well.
According to a medical bulletin, he was brought to the medical college around 8.25 pm on Thursday in an unconscious state after he had complained of vomiting. A team of nine doctors attended to him but he died of cardiac arrest, it stated.
Officials at the police headquarters in Lucknow said Ansari's post-mortem will be done in Banda and it will be videographed. The viscera will be preserved if needed, they said.
Earlier, Ansari was hospitalised for around 14 hours on Tuesday after he complained of abdominal pain.
Uttar Pradesh Director General of Police Prashant Kumar had said on Thursday that prohibitory orders under the section 144 of the CrPC have been imposed across the state and teams of the Central Reserve Police Force along with the local police deployed in Banda, Mau, Ghazipur and Varanasi.
The social media cell of the Uttar Pradesh Police has also been activated to keep a close watch on unlawful elements online, the police chief had said.