Opposition leaders on Thursday said that the decision to relocate the statues of Mahatma Gandhi, BR Ambedkar and Chhatrapati Shivaji within the Parliament complex was “arbitrary” and “atrocious”.
Congress leader Jairam Ramesh first raised the issue on social media.
“Statues of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, Mahatma Gandhi, and Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar have just been removed from their places of prominence in front of the Parliament House,” Ramesh said in a post on X. “This is atrocious.”
Following this, the Lok Sabha Secretariat said that the statutes of the “great leaders and freedom fighters of the country were installed at different parts of the complex”, reported ANI. They were now being “respectfully installed in a grand Prerana Sthal [site of inspiration] in the Parliament House complex itself”.
“After the construction of the new Parliament Building, an action plan has been made for landscaping and beautification of the Parliament complex,” said the secretariat.
It said that visitors were unable to view several statues conveniently due to their location at different places in the complex. It said that the Prerana Sthal was “being developed in such a way that the visitors coming to visit the Parliament complex could easily see the statues of these great leaders and take inspiration from their lives and philosophy”.
Responding to the secretariat’s statement, Ramesh said: “This is as bogus an explanation as you can get from a system run by a megalomaniac who has been decisively rejected by the people of our country.”
On Friday, the Congress Rajya Sabha MP claimed that the place where the statues were placed had been the area for the Opposition to stage peaceful and democratic protests against the Bharatiya Janata Party government.
He added that this move has made it clear that the prime minister “wants no place next to where Parliament meets protests, even in a Constitutional manner, against him and his government”. “Such stunts can no longer save him and his unstable government from falling,” Ramesh added.
Besides Ramesh, Communist Party of India leader D Raja said on Thursday that the “unilateral decision” to shift the statues was “condemnable”. “All statues in the Parliament House are erected in the honour of individuals who significantly contributed to our national life,” said Raja on social media.
He added: “BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] should find a way to shed its arrogance. They should be reminded that their contempt for the ideals of freedom, liberty and equality, embodied by Mahatma Gandhi, Dr Ambedkar and Chhatrapati Shivaji, has just resulted in massive rejection by the people in general elections.”
Raja was referring to the BJP’s inability to secure a majority on its own in the Lok Sabha elections. The party won 240 Lok Sabha seats, a significant fall from its tally of 303 seats in 2019.
Raja’s party colleague Binoy Viswam wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi saying that the move to relocate the statues was “unilateral”, reported The Indian Express.
He said that the old Parliament building, now called Samvidhan Sadan, “was a living testament to seminal moments in our history like getting Independence, adopting the Constitution, providing affirmative action, abolishing privy-purses, nationalisation of banks, establishing Panchayati Raj, etc”.
“Your government turned that building into a museum by shifting Parliament to a new building,” said Viswam. “Now your assault on our collective legacy has taken the form of tempering with iconic statues of national icons in the Parliament House premise.”
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