Prime Minister Modi inaugurated the BAPS Hindu temple in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday. Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha is the first Hindu temple in the United Arab Emirates.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi offered water in the virtual Ganga and Yamuna rivers in the temple premises ahead of the inauguration and then proceeded to offer prayers inside the temple.
PM Modi’s words on BAPS Hindu temple
“The BAPS temple will be an enduring tribute to the values of harmony, peace, and tolerance, which both India and the UAE share,” PM Modi said in a statement before he visited the Middle East nation.
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The consecration ceremony of the BAPS Hindu Temple was held earlier today.
The temple is adorned with pink sandstone and sits on a 27-acre plot in Abu Dhabi. The BAPS Mandir has become one of the largest temples in the Middle East. With Islam as the official religion of the UAE, the country is yet the home to about 3.6 million Indian workers.
The guest list for the inauguration ceremony at the temple included Indian government officials, Bollywood stars, and members of the billionaire Ambani family. Senior Abu Dhabi officials also attended the consecration.
Navdeep Suri, the former Indian Ambassador to the UAE, said that it is a very symbolic day for the Indian community. He added that it has been a spiritual as well as religious need for them.
“I think it’s a very symbolic day for the Indian community, for the large Indian diaspora that we have in UAE. For many years, it’s been a spiritual need, a religious need for them. And I know that in 2015, when the Prime Minister came here for the first time, he put in a request to Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, then crown prince of Abu Dhabi, that it would be nice if some land could be granted,” he told ANI.
Singer-composer Shankar Mahadevan also arrived at the temple and expressed happiness over the opening of the BAPS Hindu Mandir in Abu Dhabi.
“This is a delightful moment for India and Indians all over the world. This is a historic moment in our lives where we are going to witness a Mandir which is so magnificent and spiritual coming on a land like Abu Dhabi. Only our PM Narendra Modi can execute this…”
This is the second major religious site that PM Modi inaugurated in the past weeks. In January, he presided over the consecration ceremony of the grand Ram temple in Ayodhya which was built on the site of a demolished 16th-century mosque following the resolution of a decades-long legal battle.
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(With inputs from ANI)
