Thursday, November 7, 2013

Tallest statue sparks giant row

A plan to build the world’s tallest statue in the Indian State of Gujarat is fuelling controversy throughout the nation and may yet feed in to next year’s national election.

The project has been instigated by Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and will honour Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the country’s first Deputy Prime Minister and one of the founding fathers of the Indian Republic.
The 182-metre tall memorial, about twice the height of New York’s Statue of Liberty, has been named by Modi as ‘The Statue of Unity’. He says as well as attracting visitors from all over India and the world, it will be a long-overdue tribute to one of the nation’s foremost statesmen.

But there is far more to it than that.
Modi is almost certain to be the leader of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India’s general election, due in the middle of 2014. Opposing him will be the incumbent Congress Party dominated by the Gandhi family. It is still quite possible a member of the latest generation, Rahul Gandhi, will be Modi’s opponent for Prime Minister, although he has denied it. 

Patel served as deputy to India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who is Rahul’s great-grandfather. While the two were Cabinet colleagues, they were often at odds, most fundamentally over the fledgling country’s economic path. Nehru favoured a socialistic planned economy, Patel was a free marketeer.
Nehru also sought close relations with China, believing the two Third World giants could dominate Asia in partnership; Patel warned that China would only see India as a dangerous rival, a fact borne out by the short-lived war between them in 1962.

Patel is also credited with doing the hard work that forged India into a single State out of a ramshackle collection of principalities. He is often referred to as India’s Iron Man.
With Nehru’s socialism long abandoned and India’s economy booming under a free-market system, many historians now believe that the country would have been better placed today had Patel been Prime Minister in those early days.

Add this to the fact that Patel came from Gujarat and is revered there, and Modi appears to be on to a winner. When the Federal Environment Ministry announced that they would investigate the statue project – which also includes a visitors centre, garden, hotel and convention centre – veteran BJP leader Venkaiah Naidu hit back, saying the intervention was inspired by the Gandhis who did not want to see Patel memorialised.
Naidu went on to list 450 schemes, projects and institutions that are named after various members of the Nehru-Gandhi family.

The massive statue will not be completed for four years, if at all. Well before that the BJP will be hoping it will have done its work in helping to propel Modi to the leadership of the world’s biggest democracy.   

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