Maharashtra poll-year budget big on memorials: One for Vajpayee, and another for Shivaji

The memorials promised by Maharashtra's Fadnavis govt in its budget are in addition to the ones already in the works, like the mid-sea Shivaji statue.

(From left) File photo of Uddhav Thackeray, Amit Shah and Devendra Fadnavis | PTI

Mumbai: Chhatrapati Shivaji, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, as well as citizen heroes of Maharashtra: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Maharashtra government’s final budget before the state assembly election, presented last week, had an entire section dedicated to memorials.

In all, the budget promised 10 monuments, big and small, across the state, dedicated to personalities of national as well as local significance.

These are in addition to the several showpiece memorial projects already in the works, such as those for Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray and Dr B.R. Ambedkar in Mumbai, the 121-metre Chhatrapati Shivaji statue in the Arabian Sea off Mumbai, and one for the late union minister and BJP leader Gopinath Munde at Aurangabad.

The new memorials

The proposed memorials include one in Mumbai in honour of former BJP Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

Presenting the budget, Maharashtra Finance Minister Sudhir Mungantiwar said it will be set up on the lines of the memorials for Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray and Maharashtra’s first chief minister Yashwnantrao Chavan, indicating that it will get a separate property and a trust under political control for management.

Then there is a proposed statue of freedom fighter Bal Gangadhar Tilak, popularly known as Lokmanya Tilak, at the Maharashtra Sadan in New Delhi, and yet another memorial for Maratha warrior king Chhatrapati Shivaji, this one in Pune’s Haveli taluka.

“Even if we say Maharashtra is a progressive state, take the names of Shahu, Phule, Ambedkar (social reformers Shahu Maharaj, Jyotirao Phule and Dr BR Ambedkar), the unfortunate truth is that politics in Maharashtra runs on sentiment,” said political commentator Hemant Desai.

The proposed Shivaji memorial in the Arabian Sea or the Ambedkar memorial at Indu Mills (Mumbai), he added, have helped the BJP-led state government with the Maratha and Dalit communities from time to time.

The Fadnavis government makes it a point to talk about how even though these projects were started by the erstwhile Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) dispensation, it is the current administration that got the permissions and land, allocated funds and started work.

“The Lokmanya Tilak monument may be aimed at similarly appeasing the Brahmin community in places like Pune, Dombivli, Thane and areas such as Vile Parle and Girgaum in Mumbai,” Desai said.

“This has been the traditional way of going about politics and appeasing certain communities for votes,” added political commentator Prakash Bal.

“Unfortunately, in our society, there is a tendency to idolise personalities, which prompts demands such as building monuments for that personality, naming schools and colleges after them and so on,” he said. “These demands become emotive issues and political parties try to win over voters by promising to meet them. But it is actually a sheer waste of money.”

Besides Vajpayee, Tilak and Shivaji, the budget also proposed a monument at Nashik for the 100 tribals who took part in a jungle satyagraha, a memorial in Jalgaon for freedom fighter Khajaji Naik, another at Sawantwadi for Shivramraje Bhosale, who was one of the rulers of the erstwhile Sawantwadi princely state, and one at Kudal in Sindhudurg for theatre producer and dramatist Macchindra Kambli.

“A lot of communities have different demands that locally matter during elections,” said a former BJP legislator who did not wish to be named said.

“It becomes fiscally-difficult to get big schemes for all communities, but meeting their emotive aspirations of memorials helps to a certain extent,” the legislators added.

With polls close at hand, boost to existing projects

Meanwhile, with the assembly election months away, work on the previously-sanctioned memorials seems to have gathered pace.

CM Fadnavis said in the state legislative assembly last week that the government had decided to increase the height of the Ambedkar statue at Indu Mills from 350 feet to 450 feet.

“In 2020, when followers of Ambedkar gather in Mumbai for the mahaparanirman din (Ambedkar’s death anniversary on 6 December), they will be able to visit the completed memorial,” Fadnavis added.

Similarly, the state government recently directed the City and Industrial Development Corporation, a town-planning agency of Maharashtra, to raise the funds required for the Gopinath Munde memorial at Aurangabad. It is also pulling out all the stops to get the Supreme Court’s go-ahead to resume work on the mid-sea Shivaji memorial.

“We took all the permissions needed for the project, gave the work order, started work and almost completed the pre-development works at the site,” Fadnavis said in the assembly.

“We have completed work worth almost Rs 70-80 crore… There was a petition in the Bombay High Court, which ruled in our favour. Now, the apex court has stayed the project, the next hearing is in July and we have requested India’s attorney general to represent us,” he added.

Shantaram Kunjir, a leader of the Maratha Kranti Morcha, said, memorials have about a “10-15 per cent impact” on swinging votes close to elections.

“Some people live on sentiments. The government announces memorials and it makes people happy for a while, makes them give a government another chance,” he added, “But, they don’t realise that nothing really is being done for the community as such.”

“Our demand was to have one Chhatrapati Shivaji memorial of an international standard. We first raised this demand 25 years ago, but successive governments have turned it into a political game,” he said, “Now, as a result, the problem is that there are a number of small and big Shivaji memorials across the state.”