BFF-16-17 India’s billon-dollar battle to build the world’s biggest statue

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India’s billon-dollar battle to build the world’s biggest statue

SARDAR SAROVAR DAM, India, Sept 3, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – The world’s biggest
statue is rising in a remote corner of India to honour an independence hero
but it could quickly be 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 being
spent on the two giant effigies, each more than twice as tall as the Statue
of Liberty.

A 182-metre-high (600-foot-high) tribute to independence icon Sardar
Vallabhbhai Patel in Gujarat state will be the first to dwarf the Spring
Temple Buddha in China, currently the world’s biggest statue at 128 metres
(420 feet) in height.

Pick-axes are also swinging for a 212-metre-high likeness of 17th-century
king 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 the
figure of Patel so it can be ready for inauguration on October 31 by Prime
Minister Narendra Modi.

The 29.9-billion-rupee ($430-million) “Statue of Unity” overlooking the
isolated Sardar Sarovar Dam is a pet project of Modi.

He has predicted it will attract “hordes” of tourists, as the Statue of
Liberty does in New York.

Visitors will be able to access a viewing gallery 153 metres up — about
chest height on the huge standing figure.

But they will have to travel 250 kilometres (150 miles) from the state’s
main city of Allahabad to get there.

– ‘Iron Man’ emerges –

There is also a political motive to the mega project, with India heading
into a campaign for a national election early next year.

Patel was deputy to India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru after
independence in 1947 and Modi’s nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party says his
name has been unfairly overshadowed by the dominant Nehru dynasty.

MORE/MR/ 1130 hrs

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Patel became known as the “Iron Man of India” by persuading — through
talks and a hint of force — some 550 princely states to become part of India
after independence from Britain in 1947. He died three years later.

Many Hindu nationalists feel it was a slight when Patel was asked to step
aside to let the secular Nehru become the country’s first leader.

“Every Indian regrets Sardar Patel did not become the first prime
minister,” Modi said while campaigning in 2013.

“Modi has used Patel’s legacy a lot in his election campaigns,” said
Ghanshyam Shah, a former professor of class politics at Jawaharlal Nehru
University in New Delhi.

“He is very likely to use the Statue of Unity during the upcoming campaign
but I am worried about how it will influence voters,” Shah added.

The opposition Congress party says that a plan to change the Nehru Memorial
museum in New Delhi into a centre devoted to all of India’s prime ministers
is another bid to taint Nehru’s name.

In 2016, Modi laid the foundation stone in Maharashtra state for the statue
of Shivaji, a hero of the 80 million strong Marathi community based in the
state.

Hindu nationalists have also adopted Shivaji, who made his name battling
the 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 Chhatrapati
Shivaji International Airport.

– Statue politics –

“The BJP has been appropriating icons for some time,” said Sudha Pai of the
Indian Council of Social Science Research.

“Patel has been used to wipe out the Nehru legacy. The BJP wants to change
the way history is perceived and show that the right wing was as important in
India’s freedom struggle.”

Preliminary work has started on the controversial project — with a museum,
park and helipad — on reclaimed land two kilometres (1.5 miles) out to sea.

Environmentalists and thousands of fishing workers oppose the statue
because of the threat to fishing stocks.

The price of the monument is certain to rise, analysts say and the state
government has already changed the design to bring down costs.

How it will eventually look and when it will be finished remains in doubt.

India’s statue politics often fall victim to “hard economic reality”,
according to Badra Narayan, a professor at the Pant Social Science Institute
in Allahabad.

An overrun is inevitable, according to I.C. Rao, head of a Mumbai citizens’
group, who has questioned the cost and safety of the Shivaji design.

He said finishing the statue on time, would be “an impossibility even for
the Trojans”.

BSS/AFP/MR/ 1130 hrs