Lucknow, Nov. 8 -- Samajwadi Party president and former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav will visit the Ram temple in Ayodhya with his family on December 12. This will be his first visit to the shrine since its consecration in January 2024. Samajwadi Party leader and former UP minister Tej Narayan Pandey, popularly known as Pawan Pandey, confirmed the plan. Pandey will also accompany Yadav and his family during the visit. The announcement comes nearly three years after the temple's grand consecration and just months before the high-stakes 2027 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections. "SP president Akhilesh Ji along with his family will first visit Hanumangarhi and then the Ram Temple. I will also be with them," Pandey told HT. Yadav, along with his wife Dimple Yadav and their children, will first offer prayers at the historic Hanumangarhi temple before proceeding to the Ram Temple for darshan of Ram Lalla. For the Samajwadi Party, the December 12 visit forms part of a broader outreach. In recent months, Akhilesh has increased visible engagement with Hindu religious sites and leaders, including temple visits with family members and meetings with seers. Analysts see this as an attempt to expand the party's appeal beyond its traditional PDA (Pichhda, Dalit, Alpsankhyak) base and neutralise the BJP's Hindutva edge among non-Yadav and upper-caste voters. Political observers said the visit could be viewed as a deliberate effort by the Samajwadi Party to blunt the BJP's long-standing narrative branding the party and its leaders as "anti-Hindu." The BJP has repeatedly invoked the 1990 firing on kar sevaks in Ayodhya during the Ram Temple movement, which occurred during the tenure of Akhilesh's father, then chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav, to attack the Samajwadi Party. In October, during a visit to Ayodhya for a Shrimad Bhagwat Katha organised by Pandey, Yadav reiterated that he would seek an auspicious date for the temple darshan once the Etawah project was ready and asked Pandey to finalise it. Akhilesh has already declared Pawan Pandey as the Samajwadi Party candidate from the Ayodhya assembly seat, months ahead of the state elections, and publicly dared chief minister Yogi Adityanath to contest from there. The timing of the visit is significant, given that the BJP has often used Ayodhya as a tool against Akhilesh Yadav and the Samajwadi Party. The BJP continues to project the Ram temple as a central achievement of its tenure, while also facing occasional scrutiny over issues such as alleged irregularities in temple donations. The controversy over the alleged theft and embezzlement of donations at the Ram Temple was first publicly highlighted by Samajwadi Party leaders, with Ayodhya's Pawan Pandey raising specific claims of crores of rupees being siphoned off. Akhilesh Yadav amplified the issue on June 7, 2026, through social media posts demanding accountability and transparency, bringing it firmly into the national spotlight. Thereafter, the Uttar Pradesh government formed the first SIT, which led to the arrest of eight people, recoveries of nearly Rs 80 lakh and resignations of key trust functionaries including Champat Rai. The controversy turned into a major embarrassment for the Yogi Adityanath-led government, leading to a series of probes and criminal proceedings While Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has not visited the Ram temple in Ayodhya since its consecration in January 2024, other party leaders have done so. Congress MLA Aradhana Mishra (Mona) joined the group of MLAs who went for darshan on the invitation of assembly speaker Satish Mahana in February 2024. Former UPCC chief Ajay Rai has also visited the temple on more than one occasion, including in connection with the donation irregularities issue....