PM pays obeisance at Akshardham

Manas Dasgupta

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Gandhinagar, November 2

Prime Minister Narendra Modi today paid a brief visit to Gujarat to attend the silver jubilee celebrations of the Akshardham Swaminarayan Temple in Gandhinagar.

Modi, who arrived in Ahmedabad around 5 pm, drove to the Raj Bhavan in Gandhinagar and after a brief halt there reached the Akshardham Temple. After attending the temple ceremony, he returned to Delhi late in the evening.

Modi paid glowing tribute to memory of Pramukh Swami Maharaj, head of the Swaminarayan sect, who died a couple of years ago at 95. Describing Pramukh Swami as his father figure, the PM suggested universities across the world to closely study how Akshardham amalgamated the modern technology with traditional spiritualism of India. 

He said Akshardham temples in Gandhinagar, Delhi and some 1,200 other Swaminarayan temples constructed all over the world under the stewardship of Pramukh Swami Maharaj demonstrate a rare mixture of divinity with modernism.

After the Ramkrishna Mission, the “Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha” (BAPS) under Pramukh Swami was perhaps the second largest religious institution in the country with a strength of 1,100 sadhus and always ready to take up humanitarian cause and rush to provide aid to people in distress.

Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi, who had left for Raebarely following the boiler burst at the NTPC power plant there, returned to south Gujarat late in the evening and resumed his “Navsarjan Yatra” to campaign for the party for the Assembly poll. In Ahmedabad, Dalit leader Jignesh Mevani denied a report in a section of the press that he would be joining the Congress.