Gandhi’s statue painted saffron in Shahjahanpur

| | Lucknow | in Lucknow

Residents of a Shahjahanpur village woke up on Thursday to find the statue of Mahatma Gandhi installed in a primary school campus painted in saffron colour. 

Soon the area was agog with the question as to who did it and why.

A white statue of Mahatma Gandhi was installed in Dhaka Ghanshyampur village of Banda tehsil of Shahjahanpur almost 20 years back. On Thursday morning, the villagers suddenly noticed that the statue had been coloured in saffron hue. 

“There was talk about giving a fresh coat to the statue but no one ever thought in the dream that it will be painted in saffron colour,” said former head of the village, Manish Gupta.

Incidentally, while the statue was given a new paint, the pedestal was spared.

“This clearly shows the intention of the people who did it. This was done with a design to create disharmony in society. They gave a new colour to the statue but the pedestal is still in off-white colour,” Gupta pointed out.

District Congress president Kaushal Mishra said that local leaders and workers of Bharatiya Janata Party were behind the mischief. 

“In Yogi (Adityanath) Raj, every government building is being painted in saffron colour. The ruling party workers have not even spared the Father of Nation and have painted his statue in saffron colour. This is disgraceful,” he said and went on to ask, “Have you ever seen Mahatma Gandhi’s statue in saffron colour?”

The local Congress unit filed a complaint with the Shahjahanpur administration after which District Magistrate Amrit Tripathi ordered a probe and asked sub-divisional magistrate of Puwayana, Satyapriya Singh, to submit a report. Till then the administration has decided not to change the colour of the statue.

Pradhan of the village, Gayatri Jaiswal, however claimed that the statue was given a saffron colour in 2015 by the principal of the school. “Maybe some one has given a new coat of paint to the statue with Independence Day being round the corner,” she said. This is not the first time when statues of leaders have been given a saffron hue. Budaun was recently in news when Baba Saheb Bhimrao Ambedkar’s statue was painted in saffron colour and after media highlighted it, the district administration restored it to its original colour.