{"id":10786,"date":"2012-01-25T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-01-25T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2012\/01\/25\/russian-tourist-ejected-from-lingaraj-temple\/"},"modified":"2012-01-25T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-01-25T12:00:00","slug":"russian-tourist-ejected-from-lingaraj-temple","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2012\/01\/25\/russian-tourist-ejected-from-lingaraj-temple\/","title":{"rendered":"Russian Tourist Ejected from Lingaraj Temple"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/timesofindia.indiatimes.com\/city\/bhubaneswar\/Russian-enters-Lingaraj-temple\/articleshow\/11620018.cms\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n<p>BHUBANESWAR, ORISSA, INDIA, January 24, 2012 (Times of India): A 35-year-old Russian tourist here on Tuesday created quite a flutter after entering the 11th century Lingaraj temple that is off limits to non-Hindus. The tourist, who claimed to have converted to Hinduism in the past, identified himself as Sundar Gopal Das. Police are verifying the Russian&#8217;s passport to ascertain his identity. The name on his passport read as Skukhzat, sources said. Rituals at the temple were disrupted for nearly four hours following the foreigner&#8217;s entry. Priests performed a purification ritual and dumped the Lord&#8217;s cooked prasad worth above US$1,000, sources said. &#8220;We cleansed the temple as per tradition and dumped the prasad in a well as it was defiled following the unprecedented incident,&#8221; said Abanikant Pattnaik, temple&#8217;s executive officer.<\/p>\n<p>Das, on the other hand, feigned ignorance about the shrine stricture. &#8220;I was ignorant about the prohibition on the entry of non-Hindus into the shrine. Nobody stopped me at the entrance,&#8221; the Russian told TOI. The Russian tourist was let off after routine verification. The Lingaraj temple was witness to a similar chaotic situation following the entry of a foreigner in September 2008. In another incident in March 2009, a Hindu NRI boy from Poland, Ryszard Ankur Ahuja was stopped from entering Lingaraj temple as he looked like a foreigner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source BHUBANESWAR, ORISSA, INDIA, January 24, 2012 (Times of India): A 35-year-old Russian tourist here on Tuesday created quite a,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10786\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}