The Uttar Pradesh Cabinet on Tuesday approved a proposal to name the airport in Ayodhya after the deity Ram, reported PTI. The state government said that its Cabinet had approved the proposal to rename the Ayodhya airport Maryada Purshottam Shriram Airport.
The proposal will now be sent to the Union civil aviation ministry.
A statement from the Uttar Pradesh government said that the land acquisition process was currently under way. The state government is engaged in the development of the city and its promotion as a global religious tourism spot. A global consultant for the overall development of Ayodhya’s conservation, tourism, and infrastructure will also be hired, Hindustan Times reported.
After the Cabinet approved the proposal, Uttar Pradesh Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya tweeted, hailing the decision. “Yogi UP government’s Cabinet has approved the naming of Ayodhya airport as Maryada Purshotam Shriram Airport,” he posted. “Your state government is committed towards positioning Shriram Lala’s city Ayodhya among the top religious places in the world.”
The airport’s name was among 21 different proposals approved on Tuesday. The state Cabinet also approved the ordinance prohibiting unlawful religious conversion to crack down on “love jihad” cases in the state.
Five Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states – Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Assam – have promised to introduced strict legal provisions to prevent “love jihad”, a conspiracy theory used by Hindutva supporters, who accuse Muslim men of duping Hindu women into marriages, with the aim of converting them to Islam. Right-wing leaders allege it to be a part of a larger Muslim conspiracy of eventually turning Hindus into a minority in India.
On November 9 last year, the Supreme Court’s five-judge Constitution bench had asked the Centre to set up a trust within three months to oversee the construction of a Ram temple at the site in Ayodhya where the Babri Masjid stood till 1992. The court had said that Muslims should be given a five-acre plot elsewhere in Ayodhya for the construction of a new mosque as relief for the “unlawful destruction” of the Babri Masjid.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced the formation of the 15-member autonomous trust in Parliament on February 5. The temple’s construction began in August.
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