Offering theft controversy: Election pressure in UP changed the political mask of Congress-SP?

There can be no greater tragedy than this for any nation or society, when its cultural consciousness starts being defined under political implications. Unfortunately, something similar was seen in the country in the last decades. Lord Ram is the center of collective faith in India and is in everyone’s heart, but post-independence politics created such an ideological pattern in which viewing the majority faith with suspicion became a proof of progressivism and secularism. Congress and Samajwadi Party are the most vocal products of this ideological structure.

To understand the ideological character of Congress and Samajwadi Party, a long list of facts is not necessary, just a few incidents are sufficient. First of all, let us talk about Samajwadi Party, whose history has the stigma of firing on Karsevaks in 1990 and the death of Kothari brothers. Earlier, when senior BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani took out Rath Yatra and Kar Sevaks Ayodhya Who would have forgotten the boast of the then Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav that not even a bird could be killed in Ayodhya.

Arrest of thousands of kar sevaks and temporary jails are also part of SP’s history. Samajwadi Party’s socialism may have once been an ideological movement based on social justice, but the path it chose on the issue of Ayodhya was only to appease a particular vote bank and this was seen continuously after Mulayam Singh Yadav during the tenure of his son Akhilesh Yadav.

Targeting the government even before the facts come out

This strategy of pleasing a particular community by standing against faith is counted among the most evil experiments of Indian politics. Under this strategy, in 2019, when the Supreme Court gave a historic verdict in favor of Ram Janmabhoomi, SP’s reaction was cold and formal. How can the sudden manifestation of devotion to Ram be credible in a party whose ideological foundation is based on doubt about Hindu faith?

The latest example of SP’s ideological legacy can be seen in the recent statements of Akhilesh Yadav. In June 2026, when the case of manipulation in the offerings of Ayodhya temple came to light, the SP chief started targeting the government even before the full facts came out. His comments in themselves show that for Akhilesh, Ayodhya is still less a matter of faith and more a field of politics.

If it was a matter of faith, he would definitely have gone to see Lord Ramlala. His statement that he will visit Maryada Purushottam Ram only after the construction of his Kedareshwar Dham Shiv Temple in Etawah is completed, shows that for him, faith in Ram Lalla is dependent on the condition of completion of the political project of his parliamentary constituency. Vote politics is visible in this also.

Talking about Congress, its stance regarding Lord Shri Ram Temple is even deeper and dangerous, because its ideological roots are in that model of Nehruvian secularism. Nehru’s uneasiness over the appearance of the statue in the Janmabhoomi complex in 1949 was an early indication of this ideological discomfort, when the ruling establishment saw the natural emergence of faith as an administrative problem. This mentality later came to the fore in the form of an affidavit in 2007, which challenged the historical existence of Aaradhya, the idol of crores of Indians.

Congress rejected the invitation for life consecration ceremony.

In this context, the incident of 2017 also needs to be kept in mind, when during the hearing of Ram Janmabhoomi case in the Supreme Court, senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal, who was advocating on behalf of Sunni Waqf Board, argued that the hearing of this case should be postponed, because it could have an impact on the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. The court rejected this argument outright and kept judicial independence paramount, but this incident is proof of the ideological uneasiness of the Congress leadership regarding the temple.

Earlier in 1992, after the collapse of the disputed structure, the then Congress government had brought an ordinance and acquired the surrounding 67 acres of land including the disputed site with the aim that the Hindu party could not carry forward any construction work there.

Congress had also rejected the invitation for the consecration ceremony in January 2024, calling it a political program of BJP and RSS and this was the moment when the party was completely exposed regarding its ideological position. Now the state president of the same Congress, Ajay Rai, is bowing his head at the threshold of the temple, so this is not an ideological change, but an acceptance of ideological defeat.

SP-Congress became active after seeing the elections

Another aspect worth noting in this entire incident is the timing of elections. The Ayodhya activism of both Congress and SP intensified at the very moment when news of irregularities in temple offerings came and the SIT investigation began. It is no coincidence that the issue which the devout society wanted to be looked at with seriousness and restraint, was immediately turned into a political weapon by the opposition parties. This trend is a continuation of that old ideological thinking, in which the question of faith was never sacred, but always remained only a means to achieve political objectives. Earlier this tendency was manifested in the form of opposition to faith, now it is manifesting itself in the form of ostensible support of faith.

There is another question and it is also very serious that if these parties were really so concerned about the transparency of the temple system, then why was this concern never seen publicly during the construction of the temple, at the time of consecration, or in the last one and a half years. Both SP and Congress parties are in the ideological dock because here the question is not about any one incident, but about an entire political tradition.

The ideology of these parties which gave the message for decades that public expression of Hindu faith is an object of suspicion, sages and saints are miscreants, kar sevaks are fundamentalists and temple movement is communalism, that ideology is still alive in the same basic structure. Its mask has changed only under electoral pressure and it has changed because both the parties are seeing that they cannot survive in the elections by ignoring the public faith in Ram Temple. But, Indian voters are now more aware than before and waits for time with patience.

(The views expressed in the article are the personal views of the author)