On the evening of 19 December, a new Shiv Mandir was revived at the Sarai Miyan area of Aligarh. The temple was discovered in a Muslim-dominated area which falls under Delhi Gate police station in Aligarh.
Previously, a similar abandoned temple was found in the Sarai Rehman area, another Muslim-dominated locality under the Bannadevi police station area.
STORY | Second abandoned Shiv temple discovered in Aligarh within couple of days
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The members of Bhartiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) reached the place and revived the temple by cleaning the premises and doing purification of the temple.
Harshad, secretary of the city unit of the BJYM, who arrived on the spot along with Ankur Shivaji, a leader of the Bajrang Dal, and many others, said the locked temple premises were in a state of complete mess with idols strewn all over debris.
Further, these leaders added that in the presence of the police administration in Aligarh, the lock of the temple premises was broken, and the members of the organisation cleaned and purified the temple.
On Thursday night, the Superintendent of Police (town), Mrigank Shekhar Pathak said, “The meeting of the peace society is being organized to keep the area violence-free”.
He further added, “the meeting was for the smooth revival of the temple so people would be able to worship at the newly found Shiv Temple. There have been no events of violence recorded in either the areas yet.”
In recent weeks, several temples have been found and recovered in Muslim-dominated areas of different districts of UP. Last week, idols of Hindu lords Ganesh, Parvathi and Kartikey recovered from the well near the newly found temple, which had been closed since 1978 in Sambhal. A Hindu temple was located in a house inside a street in the Muslim-dominated area of Madanpur, Varanasi, the Prime Minister’s parliamentary constituency.
Notably, these cases are not merely coincidences. Rather, it shows possibly thousands of cases like this are hidden in Muslim-dominated areas. These newly found temples raise a serious question: why are there hidden temples in Muslim-dominated areas, and why the political parties are not raising their voices in support of systematic surveys in these areas?
Why the burden of being secular and being tolerant is on the majority group, that is, Hindus? Why the same can’t be expected of the Muslim community, which has destroyed and captured Hindu temples during their brutal rule? The report will leave you with these questions to think about and come up with honest answers in your head in order to give you a reality check.