Modi pays homage to Kolhapur memorial in Poland. But its counterpart in India wears look of neglect

Poland & Kolhapur have a connection that goes back to World War II. About 5,000 Polish families lived there as refugees from 1943 to 1948 during and after the war.

Memorial for Poles in Valivade | Special arrangement

Mumbai: In September 2019, a Polish delegation visited Maharashtra’s Kolhapur with the country’s deputy foreign minister, laying the foundation stone for a memorial pillar in the district’s Valivade village, about eight kilometres from Kolhapur city. 

Five years on, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who went to Poland Monday, visited a similar memorial in the country’s capital, Warsaw. This marks the first visit to Poland by an Indian prime minister in 45 years. The plaque at the memorial read: “Thanks to the hospitality of the principality of Kolhapur. Dispersed throughout the world, we remember India with heartfelt gratitude.”

Separated by more than 6,000 kilometres, Poland and Kolhapur have a special connection that goes back to the Second World War. About 5,000 Polish families lived there as refugees from 1943 to 1948 during and after the Second World War. The first group of Poles arrived in Valivade on 11 June, 1943. 

Now, every year, there is a trickle of Polish visitors to Valivade who are keen to see the place where they spent their childhood years, the village sarpanch Rupali Kusale told ThePrint.

“Since the prime minister’s visit to the memorial in Warsaw and his mention of Valivade on a global stage, there has been a lot of excitement among the people in our village. All youngsters have put up social media statuses of how this is the pride of Valivade. People from other places are coming to take pictures of the memorial pillar here,” Kusale said.

However, while the Warsaw memorial has made national headlines, the memorial in Valivade wears a look of neglect. “There was nobody to take care of it, spend on maintenance,” the sarpanch said.

Kusale told ThePrint that some of the barracks that housed Polish families were later used for rehabilitating a few Pakistani Sindhi people who had crossed over to India after partition. Many of them turned these into their permanent homes.

Modi’s visit to the memorial in Warsaw and his verbal tribute to the royal family of Kolhapur is also politically significant considering it comes about two months ahead of assembly polls in Maharashtra. 

It was Kolhapur’s royal family—descendants of the Maratha warrior king Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj—that had given refuge to the Poles during the Second World War. 

This Lok Sabha election, Shahu Maharaj Chhatrapati, whose lineage is in the same royal family, had given a drubbing to Mahayuti as a Congress candidate. The Mahayuti comprises the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Ajit Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). 

Shahu Chhatrapati trounced the Shiv Sena’s Sanjay Mandlik and Congress ended up winning the Kolhapur parliamentary constituency for the first time in 25 years.

Kolhapur’s royal family is revered and considered to be integral to the district. Talking about the significance of the royal family in Kolhapur, historian Indrajeet Sawant had in May told ThePrint that irrespective of party lines, no programme in Kolhapur is considered complete without Chhatrapati Shahu.

Memorial in Valivade

In 2019, when the then Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Marcin Przydacz laid the foundation stone for a memorial in Valivade, it was followed by a large celebration in the village. 

About 20 Polish people who had lived in the Valivade refugee camp as children had travelled for the occasion and were designated as state guests. Moreover, the Kolhapur district collectorate had also invited three Indian descendants of Poles who had stayed back after the Second World War ended and had married into Indian, Kolhapur-based families.

At that time, there were grand plans of renovating the barracks in which the Polish families lived, creating a museum, putting up paintings, photographs and displaying any other items from the time when Valivade was home to the Poles, an official from the district collector’s office had told ThePrint in 2019.

Five years on, none of it has really materialised. An official from the district collectorate told ThePrint requesting anonymity that a small museum was built soon after the 2019 function when the government had released some funds. 

“However, there was no decision on who will maintain the structure, whether to give it to the gram panchayat or the Zilla Parishad or some other government body and as a result the museum never really took off,” he said. 

Sarpanch Kusale said she wasn’t even aware that the museum existed until she asked around about it after Modi’s function in Warsaw. 

Meanwhile, a memorial pillar that has stood in Valivade for several years, stands worn out, with moss and dirt covering parts of the white structure and parts of the paint having chipped away.

(Edited by Radifah Kabir)