By IANS
Bhubaneswar : Thousands of activists of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) Wednesday blocked roads and stopped trains in several places across Orissa to protest the Sethusamudram canal project in Tamil Nadu that they say will destroy a ‘bridge’ held sacred in Hindu mythology.
Activists blocked roads across the state from 8 a.m. and the strike has been successful, Omprakash Mohanty, a BJP leader, told IANS.
While hundreds of activists led by MP Jual Oram staged protests at the steel city of Rourkela, state BJP president Suresh Pujari led protests at Bhubaneswar, he said.
Roads were blocked in at least a dozen places in Bhubaneswar, leading to traffic jams. Activists also stopped several trains in Jatani, Sambalpur and in the state capital, apart from other towns, Mohanty said.
The VHP claims that the canal project, that will cut shipping time in the southern tip of India, would damage the Adam’s Bridge or Ram Sethu, that many Hindus claim was built by the monkey brigade to enable Ram to reach then Lanka (now Sri Lanka) to rescue his wife Sita from the clutches of demon king Ravana.
Hindutva parties claim that US space agency NASA had the bridge in the Indian Ocean carbon dated as being 1.7 million years old. However, NASA and Indian scientists say the ‘bridge’ was nothing but a natural string of underwater coral reefs.