The Mathura site: Next on the VHP's agenda The Mathura site: Next on the VHP's agenda

The dust from the demolition of the Babri Masjid has barely settled down. But, six months after the Ayodhya disaster, it is apparent that the Shahi Idgah adjacent to the Krishna Janmabhoomi Temple at Mathura will be the next target.

The BJP claims that Kashi and Mathura are not on its "agenda immediately". But with VHP General Secretary Ashok Singhal and RSS Joint General Secretary Rajendra Singh making no bones about the fact that Mathura is still very much on their agenda, it is just a question of time before the Hindutva forces strike again.

As Singh declared: "What Advani has said is that they are not on their agenda immediately. But he has not said it will never be."

And if the Ayodhya example is anything to go by, it may well be. After all, it took eight years after the VHP's categoric call "for the removal of the three mosques built by the marauders at Ayodhya, Mathura and Kasi" before the Babri Masjid was razed to the ground.

And the BJP adopted a formal resolution only in June 1989 at its national executive meeting, five years after the first VHP call was given in April 1984.

Now, with the Sri Krishna Janmabhoomi Trust already laying claim to the four-and-a-half acre land next to the mosque to use as a Ranga Manch (variety hall) for religious and cultural functions organised by the trust and temple authorities, it may not be long before the idgah at Mathura goes the Babri Masjid way.

As VHP President Vishnu Hari Dalmia says: "We will certainly implement the 1984 resolution but at the moment we want to concentrate on Ayodhya till the temple is built there."

The expansion of the trust's activities isn't the only evidence of the RSS-VHP combine's future plans. The Sri Krishna Janmabhoomi Sangh (SKJS) , which manages the affairs of the trust, has written to the Uttar Pradesh governor to remove the CRPF company deployed there on the pretext that it needs the land urgently to begin construction for religious activities.

A CRPF battalion and the state police were deployed by the Government here in December last year, after withdrawing the Provincial Armed Constabulary, to prevent a repeat of the Ayodhya events.

"The trust's demand for the withdrawal of the CRPF is intended to take possession of the land and fortify its claim over the idgah in the long run," says a senior district official. He also said that the withdrawal of the force was not going to take place unless the Centre wanted otherwise.

In addition to this, the issue has also reached the courts. Manohar Lal Sharma, a resident of Brindaban, has filed a case in the Allahabad High Court seeking a restraint on Muslims offering namaz five times a day ever since the Babri Masjid demolition.

Earlier namaz was offered only twice a year on Id-ul-Fitr and Id-ul-Zoha. The petition also seeks the quashing of the Places of Religious Worship Act of 1992 which recognised the status of all shrines and places of worship with effect from August 15, 1947.

Adding another strand to the already tangled skein is a petition filed by Abdul Haq, the principal of the Islamic Inter College, challenging Sharma's petition. Haq claims that the entire complex belongs to the Shahi Idgah Masjid Committee and not the temple. The petition is now before the two member bench of Justice Hansman Singh and D.P.S. Chavan.

The ownership of the 13.37 acres of land on which the idgah and the shrine are located were the subject of dispute until 1935. This was when the Allahabad High Court upheld the king of Varanasi's ownership rights over the land on which Aurangzeb had built an idgah in 1669 next to the ruins of the Keshavnath Temple - believed to be Lord Krishna's birthplace - which he had destroyed.

Then, in 1951 industrialist Yugal Kishor Birla, who had bought the land in 1944, launched the Sri Krishnabhoomi Trust to construct a temple at Krishna's birth-site.

In 1968 the SKJS and the idgah committee reached an agreement granting ownership of the land to the temple trust - dominated by the VHP including Dalmia - even as the management rights of the masjid were left to the idgah committee.

The agreement deprived the trust of the legal right to stake a claim on the masjid. Meanwhile, Sharma has filed another petition in the Mathura District Court challenging the 1968 agreement.

But the Sangh brotherhood hasn't always been known to wait for court verdicts. And it may not do so this time either.