The Bharatiya Janata Party and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh have turned the consecration of the Ram temple in Uttar Pradesh’s Ayodhya into a political event, said Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday.

Speaking about the reason for the Congress top leadership declining the invitation to the ceremony, Gandhi said that while they stand with all faiths, they “cannot be party to a political function”.

“It becomes very difficult for us when the prime minister of India and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, our principal opponents, have captured the event and turned it into an election function,” said the Wayanad MP while addressing a press conference during his Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is the parent organisation of the ruling BJP.

On January 10, the Congress said that it would not attend the consecration on January 22 as it is “clearly an RSS-BJP event”.

The Ram temple is being built on the site of the razed Babri mosque. The Babri mosque was demolished by Hindutva extremists on December 6, 1992, because they believed that it stood on the spot where the deity Ram had been born.

Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra, which is the Ram temple trust, has invited around 4,000 religious leaders and 2,200 other guests for the ceremony. Among those who received the invitations were Congress leaders Sonia Gandhi and Mallikarjun Kharge and the party’s leader in the Lok Sabha, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury.

However, the Congress said that the Hindutva organisation and the BJP have politicised a religious event.

On Tuesday, Gandhi said that even “the biggest authorities of the Hindu religion have made their view public about the January 22 function being a political event”.

Nischalananda Saraswati, the shankaracharya of the Hindu shrine in Odisha’s Puri, had said on January 13 that political interference in religious and spiritual areas was not desirable and that even the Constitution does not allow this.

Saraswati said at the Ganga Sagar Mela in West Bengal that according to the scriptures, there are laid-down rules for consecrations and the head of state or the prime minister has to follow them.

“Overstepping these rules for propagating one’s name is an act of rebellion against god... and going down the path of destruction,” the shankaracharya said

All four shankaracharyas – pontiffs of major Hindu shrines – have announced that they will not attend the consecration of the temple.

The shankaracharyas head four shrines called peeths situated in Joshimath in Uttarakhand, Dwarka in Gujarat, Puri in Odisha and Sringeri in Karnataka. The shrines were founded by eighth-century religious scholar Adi Shankaracharya.