Times Square advertisers urged not to run Hindu temple ads

A coalition wrote to NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio, asking him to stand against the images of Ram Mandir

NEW YORK:

Advocacy organisations comprising Muslims, human rights, anti-fascist and secular groups have asked advertisers in New York City's Times Square not to display images from a Hindu group that is celebrating the building of a disputed temple in India, The Washingotn Post reported.

The groundbreaking for the disputed Hindu temple was performed on Wednesday in the Indian city of Ayodhya.

Modi laid the first silver bricks at the disputed site, which will be built on top of the Babri Masjid, which Hindu hardliners destroyed in 1992. The communal violence sparked by the mosque’s destruction also left some 2,000 people dead.

Some Hindus claim their god Ram was born at the site and also claim that the Muslim Emperor Babur built a mosque on top of a temple there.

The organisers of the celebration in Times Square had bought prime billboard space to display a model of the temple as well as images of Ram, Jagdish Sewhani told the Press Trust of India, which described him as the president of the American India Public Affairs Committee.

“We are just doing a celebration and it is not against anyone. This is a once in a mankind event and we thought what better place for it than Times Square,” Sewhani told The Associated Press, reached at the phone number listed on the website for the New York gathering.

The American India Public Affairs Committee itself does not have a website, nor is a 1099 tax form available on ProPublica’s nonprofit database. There is no corporation registered under that name in New York State.

When asked specifically for details about his organisation, Sewhani described it as a “group of people” concerned with US-India relations and then said, “Let us focus on our Lord Ram.”

The AP report stated that in an interview with the South Asian Insider Show, Sewhani described himself as one of the founders of a US wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Hindu extremist ruling party of India.

Wednesday’s groundbreaking ceremony follows a ruling by India’s Supreme Court last November favouring the building of a Hindu temple on the site in Uttar Pradesh state. The court also ordered that Muslims be given five acres of land to build a new mosque at a nearby site. But the ruling disappointed Muslims, who comprise around 14 per cent of Hindu-majority India’s 1.3 billion people.

The coalition wrote to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, asking him to stand against the images of Ram and of the planned temple being shown in Times Square. They called the planned display Islamophobic and a symbol of violence against Muslims in India.

“It shows not only glamorising and glorifying an evil and cruel act,” said Shaik Ubaid, president of Indian Minorities Advocacy Network in an interview with the Associated Press. “They are so confident they are doing this in Times Square, the heart of America.”

The mayor’s office did not immediately return a request for comment.

The coalition also asked supporters to call major advertising companies, including Disney, Clear Channel and Branded Cities, to ask them not to run the images on their billboards. A representative of the company Branded Cities told the coalition on Monday that they would not run digital advertising for the celebration in Times Square, Clarion India reported.

The story was originally published by The Washington Post