SARDAR SAROVAR DAM, India – The world’s biggest statue is rising in aremote corner of India to honour an independence hero but it could quicklybe outdone by a monument to a Hindu warrior king in the sea off Mumbai.
In a burst of nationalist fervour, around one billion dollars is beingspent on the two giant effigies, each more than twice as tall as the Statueof Liberty.
A 182-metre-high (600-foot-high) tribute to independence icon SardarVallabhbhai Patel in Gujarat state will be the first to dwarf the SpringTemple Buddha in China, currently the world’s biggest statue at 128 metres(420 feet) in height.
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Pick-axes are also swinging for a 212-metre-high likeness of 17th-centuryking Chhatrapati Shivaji, resplendent on a horse and brandishing a sword,which should dominate the Mumbai shoreline from 2021.
An army of 2,500 workers — including several hundred Chinese labourers –is toiling around the clock to put 5,000 squares of bronze cladding on thefigure of Patel so it can be ready for inauguration on October 31 by PrimeMinister Narendra Modi.
The 29.9-billion-rupee ($430-million) “Statue of Unity” overlooking theisolated Sardar Sarovar Dam is a pet project of Modi.
He has predicted it will attract “hordes” of tourists, as the Statue ofLiberty does in New York.
Visitors will be able to access a viewing gallery 153 metres up — aboutchest height on the huge standing figure.
But they will have to travel 250 kilometres (150 miles) from the state’smain city of Allahabad to get there.
There is also a political motive to the mega project, with India headinginto a campaign for a national election early next year.
Patel was deputy to India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru afterindependence in 1947 and Modi’s nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party says hisname has been unfairly overshadowed by the dominant Nehru dynasty.
Patel became known as the “Iron Man of India” by persuading — throughtalks and a hint of force — some 550 princely states to become part ofIndia after independence from Britain in 1947. He died three years later.
Many Hindu nationalists feel it was a slight when Patel was asked to stepaside to let the secular Nehru become the country’s first leader.
“Every Indian regrets Sardar Patel did not become the first primeminister,” Modi said while campaigning in 2013.
“Modi has used Patel’s legacy a lot in his election campaigns,” saidGhanshyam Shah, a former professor of class politics at Jawaharlal NehruUniversity in New Delhi.
“He is very likely to use the Statue of Unity during the upcoming campaignbut I am worried about how it will influence voters,” Shah added.
The opposition Congress party says that a plan to change the Nehru Memorialmuseum in New Delhi into a centre devoted to all of India’s prime ministersis another bid to taint Nehru’s name.
In 2016, Modi laid the foundation stone in Maharashtra state for the statueof Shivaji, a hero of the 80 million strong Marathi community based in thestate.
Hindu nationalists have also adopted Shivaji, who made his name battlingthe Muslim Mughal empire. Critics say the 36-billion-rupee ($515-million)statue is a way of winning Marathi votes in next year’s election.
Fuelling the fervour, the government announced last week that the word”Maharaj”, or king, had been added to the title of Mumbai’s ChhatrapatiShivaji International Airport. – APP/AFP