Ram Mandir fight to go online

PANAJI, GOA: The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) has gone into an overdrive -- including going online -- to motivate journalists, oriented towards Hindutva and working in regional media, to write more emphatically about the Ram janmabhoomi issue, in the run up to the Allahabad High Court verdict on the contentious Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid issue.

A top VHP leader, who was in Goa to conduct a workshop exclusively for Hindutva-oriented journalists in the state, said there is need for a strategic shift in the media-management policies of the VHP.

He stressed the need to focus more on regional media and local cable television networks over the "secular" national media and tap the blogs and twitter space to attract the "Cafe Coffee Day (frequenting) youngsters, who have been cut adrift from the Hindutva pulse".

"The national media (both print and electronic) is important but it has now become the arm of the government. They are killing our news. Their point of view is so-called secular and anti-Hindu. We must focus on the regional media to put forth our point of view," Prashant Hartalkar, Maharashtra region organising secretary of the VHP, told IANS Friday.

Hartalkar, who is conducting exclusive media workshops on similar lines across Maharashtra and Goa, also said the local media was hungry for news and it had greater reach and had a better pulse of the mofussil population than the national media.

"Twitter and blogs are contemporary and new media forums which are essential when it comes to cultivating favourable public opinion on the Ram Mandir issue," he said.

"We must tap blogs and twitter space to rope in the youngsters who spend hours at places like (Cafe) Coffee Day - spending hundreds of rupees on coffee. They are completely ignorant of the Ram Janmabhoomi issue. India is a young country and we cannot afford to alienate youngsters in this movement," Hartalkar said, adding VHP alone had 86 active blogs linked to its official website.

At an exclusive VHP media workshop, where attendance for journalists was by invitation only, Hartalkar spoke on several contentious issues related to the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, which according to the senior VHP leader, "could not be spoken in front of all journalists and, therefore, had to be discussed only with journalists with a Hindu base".

Apart from reeling out the entire chronology of events which led to the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid conundrum, one of the contentious issues discussed by Hartalkar was the element of 'purushartha (physical daring)' which was required in the campaign for the Ram Mandir.

"Shri Ram's life was a symbol of purushartha. He killed evil and aggressors by creating a united team. We need to emulate this purushartha of Shri Ram. We need to fight unitedly and build the mandir not as Ram temple but as a national temple," Hartalkar said.