Yugal Kishor Shastri has been walking 490 kilometres from the holy city of Ayodhya to the Dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin in Delhi for the past three years to promote communal harmony, chagrined at the recent happenings in Ayodhya and convinced that the country belongs to every Indian.
“It is not the land of bloodshed but the land of peace and brotherhood. It is very wrong to say Ayodhya belongs to only Hindus. It is the land for every religion, a land for every Indian. That is why I decided to walk every year from Ayodhya to Delhi to show the people what a Hindu from Ayodhya thinks,” he said at the end of his latest yatra here on Monday.
The fourth “Communal Harmony Yatra” in which Shastri was accompanied by 20 other individuals from all over the country along with around nine organisations concluded with a conference on communal harmony in which the ideals of brotherhood, peace and loving one's neighbours were discussed in detail with speakers from different faiths.
“The name Ayodhya, the idea of Ayodhya meant Ayudh or the land where there will never be a war…it was like this in the ancient city…it is only now that everything has changed,” said Mohammad Ahmed of Jamaat-e-Islami, a Muslim organisation which was part of the yatra .
“There have been many attempts to break this land, this land of many faiths and diverse cultures and only those who work toward peace and without any hopes of personal gain will be able to save this land,” he said, adding that there was cause to be worried with the sort of extremism that was being encouraged in the country by politicians.
‘Truth victimised'
His thoughts were echoed by fellow yatri Asghar Ali Engineer from the Centre for Study and Secularism who said: “The truth is always victimised chasing votes; politicians will take advantage of our ignorance to spread hatred in the name of religion. No religion prescribes hatred for one's neighbours. The goal behind this yatra is to visit every village, hold talks and seminars and appeal to people to not believe every bad thing that is said about a different religion.”
He said people from different faiths had been living under the same sky and drinking the same water for centuries and this unique diversity in our country had to be preserved and so yatras like this had become even more important of late.
The yatra started from Ayodhya on October 11 and passed through Faizabad, Lucknow, Sitapur, Shahjahanpur and Moradabad where the message of communal harmony was spread through seminars and talks, before reaching the Capital on Sunday.
