Mangaluru: Terming the Janagraha rallies of the Sangh Parivar outfits demanding the construction of Ram Temple in Ayodhya as a political stunt to favour the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the former State president of the Bajrang Dal Mahendra Kumar on Sunday asked people to be cautions against the Sangh Parivar’s attempts to polarise society.

Speaking at a panel discussion of the former activists of the Sangh Parivar outfits on the concluding day of the two-day Jana Nudi organised by Abhimata here, Mr. Kumar, who was heading the State Bajrang Dal unit during the 2008 attack on churches, said that people should not give much heed to the temple agitation. “There is no dispute regarding building the temple in Ayodhya. Muslim groups are not opposed to it,” he said and added that this is being raised only to help the BJP win the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections.

“The BJP government failed to act (on the temple) all these years. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has gone back to the Ayodhya issue just to turn the attention away from his failures in governance,” Mr. Kumar said. The agitation is being carried out just to incite Muslim groups and encash on the latter’s reaction to the movement, he said.

Recalling how he and the other activists who have now quit the Sangh Parivar are being targeted, Sudhir Marolli, a former RSS activist from Koppa in Chikkamagaluru district, who is now pracitising law, said that he was being branded as a naxalite as he represented Gowri Lankesh.

Nikethraj Maurya, who was involved in the Jago Bharat and the Namo Brigade campaign, said that his understanding of Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawarharlal Nehru changed after reading books on their lives.