Delhi: Within seconds of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi laying the foundation stone for a statue that will be the biggest in the world - twice as big as the 93-metre tall Statue of Liberty - and will change the Mumbai skyline for ever, battlelines were being drawn between critics and supporters of the multimillion dollar project.
For the ceremony, Modi sailed in a hovercraft four kilometres off the coast of Mumbai on Christmas Eve to the piece of reclaimed land far out in the Arabian Sea where the 192-metres statue of the 17th century Hindu warrior Shivaji will come up by 2019.
For years, Shivaji fought the Mughals, Muslim emperors who ruled India before the British and who built the Taj Mahal. He created his own kingdom in the western state of Maharashtra where Mumbai is located. For many Hindus, he is the embodiment of all that is good about Hindu culture.
Modi's party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has been fighting a cultural struggle to promote Hindu traditions and icons it believes have been belittled or marginalised by the liberal establishment ever since India became independent in 1947.
"Actually, the idolisation of Shivaji cuts across all party lines but the BJP wants to appropriate him for itself as part of its cultural resurgence," said political analyst Parsa Venkateshwar Rao.
The statue will be five times higher than Rio de Janeiro's Christ the Redeemer at 38 metres, and will cost $US525 million ($726 million). The BJP is also building one for another of its favourite men, Vallabhai Patel, India's first home minister.
For the critics, these statues are part of the "sectarian" and "divisive" Hindu nationalist agenda, designed to stir up hatred of the Muslim minority among Hindus and to encourage a feeling of cultural pre-eminence in the latter. Moreover, they ask, what use is a statue with so much poverty, pathetic infrastructure, inadequate hospitals, bad schools, illiteracy, and child labour?
"This is tax payers' money and I am sure we would all like this money to be spent on something better like education, infrastructure, and food. This is not what Shivaji would have wanted…," are the words of an online petition started by Mumbai-based freelance journalist Krishma Upadhyay to stop the project.
A competing online petition has been started by someone called Bhushan Agarwal who says the Shivaji statue is the victim of a "smear campaign" and must be built, no matter what.
As in any country, the statues erected in public places in India reflect the preferences of the ruling elite. Those of Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi predominate. You don't see many – or any – statues of dalits, the 160 million Hindus who belong to the lowest caste.
Consequently, it has been a vital exercise in self-respect for dalits to erect statues (or usually, for lack of funds, small busts) of their hero, Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar, a fabulously erudite dalit and a hugely important contemporary of Nehru and Gandhi who wrote the Indian constitution.
When dalit politician Mayawati built the colossal Ambedkar Memorial Park in Lucknow in 2008, she was working on many levels: honouring Dr Ambedkar because nothing had been built in memory of dalit leaders, showing that dalits were capable of building beautiful monuments, giving dalits something to be proud of, and ensuring a place of herself – India's first dalit woman chief minister – in the history books. Ambedkar was a savage critic of the Hindu caste system and urged dalits to follow his example - forsake Hinduism and convert to Buddhism.
Mayawati was vilified. The elite mocked her for being a "megalomaniac" and wasting the taxpayer's money.
For some Indians, the fact that the Shivaji statue is being built at all is commendable – at least its sheer size alone will be something to be proud of. The lack of modern buildings or monuments of note - the kind that become a famous landmark and put a city on the world map – is a source of chagrin for architects.
Satirist Gautam Bhatia is not enamoured with the idea, saying it is like the statues of Lenin put up by Russian Communists.
"The political purpose implicit in such public art denudes the piece of all artistic merit. That a political party endorses it in its manifesto and is willing to shower funds for its construction reduces Shivaji to puny irrelevance," he said.
Well-known sculptor Shakti Maira agreed: "Spending this huge sum of money and changing the Mumbai skyline for ever, could be done for a work that has a bigger and more inspiring vision than dear old Shivaji," said Maira.
The statue sculptors, Anil Sutar and his 92-year-old father Ram in Noida, are unruffled by the controversy. Though their design of the warrior, shown on a horse and holding aloft a sword, has been approved, they have yet to start work on it.
"I don't want to get into the politics. We are just sculptors. All I can say is that if people had worried about how much the Taj Mahal would cost, it would never have been built," said Anil Sutar.
