{"id":1183,"date":"2001-09-07T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2001-09-07T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2001\/09\/07\/2001-09-07-puri-temple-priests-opposed-watchtower\/"},"modified":"2001-09-07T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2001-09-07T12:00:00","slug":"2001-09-07-puri-temple-priests-opposed-watchtower","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2001\/09\/07\/2001-09-07-puri-temple-priests-opposed-watchtower\/","title":{"rendered":"Puri Temple Priests Opposed Watchtower"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.indian-express.com\/ie20010905\/nat3.html\">GO TO SOURCE<\/A><\/P><br \/>\n<P><\/p>\n<p>PURI, INDIA, September 5, 2001: Puri&#8217;s temple priests have opposed the Orissa Tourism Department&#8217;s proposal to build a watch-tower outside the Jagannath temple to help non-Hindus get a glimpse of the 13th century structure. Ipsit Pratihari, president, Sri Jagannath Sevayat Kalyan Parishad, said: &#8221;This move will endanger the security of the temple and so should not be allowed.&#8221; A marble plaque outside the lion&#8217;s gate says that only orthodox Hindus are allowed in. The tourism authorities had hit on the idea to build a 45-ft tower outside the temple&#8217;s singhadwar (lion&#8217;s gate) to attract tourists. The proposed tower would help tourists see the sprawling complex clearly, though the three deities in the sanctum sanctorum would be out of sight. Pratihari said: &#8221;If any attempt is made to turn the temple into a tourist attraction just to earn foreign exchange, it would hurt Hindus&#8217; religious sentiments.&#8221; Pratihari would have no non-Hindu tourists visit the shrine because it is not a tourist attraction. &#8221;If anyone from another religion is interested to have a darshan of the deities, he or she could do it during the rathyatra when they are taken outside the shrine,&#8221; he said.<br \/>\n<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>GO TO SOURCE PURI, INDIA, September 5, 2001: Puri&#8217;s temple priests have opposed the Orissa Tourism Department&#8217;s proposal to build,&#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-1183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1183","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=1183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1183\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}