Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Sunday that he was blessed to have a “darshan of the Ram Setu”, or Adam’s Bridge — a chain of limestone shoals between two islands of Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka.
PM Modi was flying back to Tamil Nadu after his three-day trip to Sri Lanka concluded on Sunday. He was on a state visit to hold bilateral talks, including safeguarding the interests of the island nation’s Tamil minority.
Taking to X, Modi in a post wrote: “On the way back from Sri Lanka a short while ago, was blessed to have a Darshan of the Ram Setu. And, as a divine coincidence, it happened at the same time as the Surya Tilak was taking place in Ayodhya. Blessed to have the Darshan of both. Prabhu Shri Ram is a uniting force for all of us. May His blessings always remain upon us.”
Hours after the PM’s tweet, former Rajya Sabha MP and BJP leader Subramaniyan Swamy criticised the PM, alleging that he was “back to grab the credit”.
Taking a dig at the PM’s post, Swamy wrote on X, “When I was arguing in SC against Vajpayee-Karunanidhi alliance who sought to cut through the Ram Setu, then where was Modi? Today Modi is back to grab credit. When the then Minister Patel [Prahlad Singh Patel] in Modi’s Ministry was seeking to declare Ram Setu as a Heritage Monument, Modi sacked him !!”
Ram Setu has remained a contentious issue since the UPA-I government, when the then shipping and transport minister TR Balu had given a go-ahead to the Sethusamudram Canal Project aimed at creating a shipping canal between India and Sri Lanka. In a 2007 press release, the BJP had criticised the project as “bound to destroy the [Adam’s) bridge, which is revered by millions of people, Hindus, Muslims, and Christians… and is considered as the most ancient heritage of our country.”
Later in 2018, on Swamy’s plea, the Centre informed the Supreme Court that it “would not touch” the Adam’s bridge while constructing the project.
The issue courted controversy again in 2022, when on a question on using modern technology to explore information of the ancient past, including Ram Setu, MoS for science Jitendra Singh said: “…concerning Ram Setu, though we have certain limitations in discovering that because the history dates back to more than 18,000 years and that bridge, if we go by the history, was about 56 kilometres long. But yes, to some extent, through space technology, we have been able to discover pieces and islands, some kind of limestone shoals, which of course can’t be accurately said to be remnants or parts of a bridge, but they have some amount of continuity in location, through which some surmises can be done. So, what I am trying to say…is that it is difficult to actually pinpoint the exact structure that existed there, but there is some kind of an indication, direct or indirect, that structures have existed.”
In 2023, the apex court dismissed a petition seeking a direction to declare Adam’s Bridge a national monument.