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Is India to be known as the materially prosperous nation that built the world's largest democracy, or as the nation that built the largest statues in the world and ruined?
P. S. Remesh Chandran
Editor, Sahyadri Books & Bloom Books, Trivandrum
Article Title Image By Setthayos Sansuwansri. Graphics: Adobe SP.
It is the conception of Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party as to whether India should be known to the world as the people with material prosperity who built the largest democracy in the world or as the people who built the biggest statues in the world, and messed up and ruined, that has been revealed through their ridiculous statue building crusade which they have been carrying on for a long time. From the ancient Egyptians who built the Sphinx in the deserts to the Mayans of South America who built the massive and intricate palaces in the Yucatan jungles- all the mega-builders disappeared from the face of the earth without leaving a trace but leaving those things for the world to wonder at, their disappearance caused by the starvation, poverty and malnutrition from this building spree.
The hunger, poverty and disease in the land of these modern day statues attests to how big a crime Modi has committed by wasting precious national resources for mere mega statue-building without looking at the future, and how much of a mindless ruler he is. At the peak of Narendra Modi's rule, in 2018, Modi's country was ranked 113 in the list of 199 countries with hunger. Below that, there were only sixteen countries in the world. It is the Prime Minister of that country who spending the rest of the country's resources also is competing with the world in statue-building!
Lack of financial discipline and mismanagement were already hallmarks of the Narendra Modi administration even before this statue-building spree began. Without stopping there, Narendra Modi is stealing into all the prized public assets of the nation that should have been used for the welfare of the people and making these statues just to write his name on them. Had Narendra Modi not been born in India, the nation would have moved forward at least twenty-five years without paucity like this in resources which would have sustained life of the people through another quarter century. Are statues a leap forward?
Following the example of Narendra Modi, in all the BJP-ruled states, the chief ministers are walking around building their own mega statues, pretending statue-making is national program. In North India, in Utthar Pradesh, India's largest Sree Rama statue surpassing all these in height and weight at a cost of 2500 crore rupees is being built, and in Maharashtra a 700 feet tall Chhatrapati Shivaji statue at a cost of ten thousand crore rupees! In Delhi, on the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University, a statue of Swami Vivekananda is being erected the cost of which is not yet revealed fearing the people. On 16 April 2022, Narendra Modi inaugurated a Hanuman statue with a height of one hundred and eight feet built at a cost of 1200 crore rupees in Mobi, Gujarat through video conferencing, as part of the construction of four massive statues in four parts of the country. On 8 September 2022, a hologram statue of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose was inaugurated at the India Gate in New Delhi. At a height of 66 meters, at the cost of 1000 crore rupees, another Equality Statue, the Ramanujacharya Statue, was inaugurated by Narendra Modi on 5 February 2022. This 216 feet tall Ramanuja statue under the BJP-assigned brand name Statue of Equality was supposedly built in Hyderabad, Telangana by G. R. Educational Foundation to satiate Narendra Modi's statue-building craze. A relevant question has also been raised as to whether the work of an educational trust is this.
Though it is so in the constitution, in the BJP's rule in practice in the land where among the different castes and religions there is no equality between them, the name of all the statues they build are Equality Statues! Who divided the people on the lines of caste and religion, built their government on the votes of those who liked this division- how can equality be created by them except in the statues at least in name? How does Narendra Modi who, while he was the Chief Minister of Gujarat, stirred up the Hindu racists, led bloody communal riots and made thousands of Muslims mutilated and homeless, and went on to become the Prime Minister to continue the same through other means, qualify to inaugurate a statue of Ramanujan who advocated equality in all aspects of life including caste, religion and faith?
It is in Prabha Devi in Bombay-Dadar in Maharashtra that the third tallest statue in the world, the 450 feet tall statue of Ambedkar who was the architect of India's constitution is coming, after the BJP MPs including the Prime Minister assembled in the parliament insulting and slighting him by revoking the special article in the Constitution he added to allow special status to Kashmir, the same MPs who again soon met to pass and try to implement three new agricultural bills giving dominance and monopoly in the agricultural sector to Reliance Corporation. (His parliament meets as the Reliance's board room meets)! In the Kashmir article revocation too they met to cancel the special status of Kashmir so that non-Kashmiri outsiders could purchase land there, resell them as real estate and start businesses there, thereby exposing the once-closed state as an open market for Reliance. Even while repealing the special article on Kashmir in the constitution and providing the outsiders like the ruling Hindu corporations the favorable physical conditions and accompanying benefits to enter Kashmir and make it their market, will building and exhibiting by them the statue of Dr. Ambedkar who wrote in that constitution that article specifically prohibiting the very same thing they do now remove any those material benefits opened to and enjoyed now by these corporations through that revocation?
It is while there are already a number of War Memorials in India including a National War Memorial at India Gate Circle in New Delhi to honor the departed soldiers of India during the 1962 India-China War, 1947, 1965 and 1971 India-Pakistan War, 1999 Indian Peace-Keeping Force’s Sri Lanka Action and the Indian Army’s 1999 Kargil War that he too is building in addition to these statues a few more in this category too, saying his contributions too are to be there to the poor Indian masses in this regard.
According to the estimates of the organization Citizens Religious Hate Crime Watch, ninety percent of the hate crimes in India that took place after 2009 were after Narendra Modi who when he was the Chief Minister of Gujarat caused the death of more than a thousand Muslims in genocide and made tens of thousands of people homeless in 2002 became the Prime Minister of India in 2014. Since then only the path changed but the goal remained the same. The current path is killing them in the name of cows- a unique something that doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world! Even that was invented as a way!! It is the research and thinking for this that is going on inside that head twenty-four hours a day. To materialize these thoughts, plans, projects, thousands of such followers like the old Ananda Margis and the Rajneesh Anarchists are being created and molded in India; poisonous seeds are being laid so that no generation will improve in future. Even when Muslims are killed by their ranks in different parts of the country, even if Christians are killed in places like Manipur, they don't blink and open their mouths: Suppose if they open their mouths, thinking that the silent permission given by their government has been withdrawn, the racial mass murders and the pogroms stop!
According to a World Bank report, India needs to create eight million new job opportunities to keep up with the growing population in 2025! Even now, unemployment is at its highest level in the last twenty years. There is no money here to give polio vaccine to the children; immediately after the Patel statue was erected they are begging for foreign aid to collect the money for giving polio vaccine to the children!
A 597 feet (182 m) tall statue of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, India’s freedom fighter and post-independence Defense Minister of the Indian National Congress, was inaugurated on 31 October 2018 by Narendra Modi in the Kevadia Colony in the small island of Sadhu Bet in the Sardar Sarovar Dam in the Narmada District 200 kilometers from Ahmadabad, Gujarat at a cost of 3000 crore rupees. It was built ninety kilometers distant from the Gujarat city of Vadodara, on the banks of the Namdada River, opposite the Sardar Sarovar Dam.
The foundation stone for this dam named after Sardar Patel was laid by the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1961 and was inaugurated by the current Prime Minister Modi after 56 years in 2017. Modi, who ruled Gujarat for many years as the Chief Minister and is now proclaiming Patel as their worshipful leader since his Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtreeya Swayamsevak Samgh have no Indian Freedom Struggle fighters and leaders as the latter abstained from participating in the Struggle fearing the British and the latter had not even born, sat and watched without doing anything on the work of this statue until he became the Prime Minister!
2,389 crore rupees, 25,000 tons of iron, 90,000 tons of cement, and 3,400 workers’ and 250 engineers’ day-and-night labor for many years went into this statue. Larsen and Toubro were entrusted with the engineering duties. The 553 bronze petals in Patel's statue were cast from a foundry in China. It was explained that there is no foundry in India that could make such large petals. After telling the people continuously that China is the enemy of the people of India and that the Chinese goods shall not be bought, this Statue of Equality was got made by Narendra Modi in China to give money to China someway as part of his personal goals.
Three-fourths of the cost of this statue was given to China as construction cost. It was the Aerosun Corporation of China that manufactured it in China and brought to and assembled it in India. It was designed and constructed claiming to withstand winds up to 180 km per hour and earthquakes 6.5 magnitudes. Looking at the height of the statue at 182 meters, which is the tallest and largest in the world, like any of Modi's constructions, when the real wind and earthquakes hit it, it will only then be known if it will survive or go down with killing the people.
It was the people of seventy-two villages driven for this statue to new barren lands with no means of living after giving land prices far below the market price. It is clear why the PM’s team left the urban areas and went in search of poor people’s colonies- if it is there, only the poor people of the lower castes will be there to be evicted! Is this the BJP’s and Narendra Modi’s pooja for Patel who united India? Many thousands lost their homes, shelters and livelihoods for this statue there. The worshipers of this statue and the outside world did not know this. And when this statue was built, Modi eloquently discoursed that all the locals were going to get jobs through it. What Narendra Modi meant by employment was offering plank-tea-shop tea to those who come there as tourists. But because it is Modi, when things move closer to the reality, the tea concession is going to the Taj Group of Hotels and all the other related facilities to the Reliance Group. It is that kind of immensely rich people that Modi expects as tourists there.
Gandhi's close disciple and in jail with Gandhi several times, Patel sat as the Deputy Prime Minister in Prime Minister Nehru's cabinet and through negotiations and reconciliation, made possible 562 sovereign states then in India to merge into the Indian Union by executing clear written agreements. (Of these, the agreement with Kashmir was violated by subverting the Constitution and taking away its special status by Modi who is now honoring Patel by building his statue). Thus, this statue of Patel who was known as the Iron Man of India was made with 5000 tons of steel including 135 metric tons of iron along with many other things donated by the people of India as old agricultural implements.
Is it not insulting to Patel who lived a simple life like Gandhi as one of Gandhi's true disciples to even think of building a statue of Patel at a cost of 3000 crore rupees in the poor India? Isn’t it repelling and vexatious? Is it not Modi making many people think that this is neither but patriotism itself misleading the people from the right path of realism which it was what followed by Patel? Doesn't the fact that there are twice as many pictures of Patel, i.e. a hundred pictures, of Narendra Modi on the web site built on the Internet for this statue, reveal Narendra Modi's intentions and meanness?
Narendra Modi, who was an activist of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) since the age of eight, building and inaugurating the statue of Vallabhbhai Patel who when one of its activists shot and killed Gandhi who worked hard for India's independence as Home Minister viewed it as a threat and danger to the country and the government and banned the very same RSS, is viewed not as opportunistic or a change with the times but as detestable and abhorrent by the nation and the world.
Written on 02 August 2023 and first published on: 29 May 2024
Original article in Malayalam written on 02 August 2023 and first published on: 20 October 2023
SM1437. ഇ൯ഡ്യ ലോകത്തിലെ ഏറ്റവുംവലിയജനാധിപത്യംകെട്ടിപ്പടുത്ത ഭൗതികൈശ്വര്യമുള്ളജനതയെന്നാണോ അറിയപ്പെടേണു്ടതു്, ഏറ്റവുംവലിയപ്രതിമകളു്നി൪മ്മിച്ചുനശിച്ച ജനതയെന്നാണോ?
https://sahyadrimalayalam.blogspot.com/2023/10/1437.html
Article Title Image By Beasternchen. Graphics: Adobe SP.
