Thousands of invited guests including top film stars, and cricketers including Amitabh Bachchan and cricketing legend Sachin Tendulkar attended  the inauguration of a grand temple to Hindu god Ram, his birth spot in Ayodhya, the tranquil pilgrim town on the banks of river Sari, a tributary of the Ganges, by Indian PM Narendra Modi. The temple has been constructed at a cost of £ 170m ($217m), funded from private donations. Mr Modi performed religious rituals Pray Partishtha, “establishment of life force” inside the temple’s sanctum along with priests and Mohan Bhagwat head of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) an extremist Hindu nationalist party. The temple fulfils a decades-long Hindu nationalist pledge to build a shrine to Lord Ram in Ayodhya, the birth place of Ram and the Babri mosque  built by Muslim invaders on the ruins of a temple at the exact site was a critical factor which propelled the BJP into political prominence in the 1990s.

In 2019 Indian Supreme Court gave the disputed land to the Hindus, although Muslims were given a plot outside the city to build a mosque. The new three-storey temple clad with pink sandstone and anchored by black granite spanning 7.2 acres in a 70-acre complex with a 51 inch (4.25ft) statue of the deity, placed on a marble pedestal in the sanctum sanctorum.