Hyderabad: The eight newly elected MLAs of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will visit the Bhagyalakshmi temple at Charminar on Saturday, December 9 for darshan, state party unit chief and Union minister G Kishan Reddy said on Friday.
Before that, a meeting will be conducted by Kishan Reddy with the MLAs at the party office in Nampally.
The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has on more than one occasion maintained that the temple on the Charminar is unauthorised. The Bhagyalaxmi temple came up in the 1960s and has since been there.
Charminar was built in 1591 as Hyderabad’s foundation by Mohd Quli Qutb Shahi, the city’s founder.
The ASI, which is the custodian of the Charminar and the Golconda fort in Hyderabad, has also been writing letters to the state over decades to shift the unauthorised construction.
The Bhagyalaxmi temple has become more and more prominent thanks to the political patronage it has been getting for some years. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has also regularly made it a point to begin its important programmes from there. Activists point out that even state ministers and other leaders from the BRS and Congress visit it for darshan, thereby legitimising it.
