‘Hope MP govt will shift Gandhi samadhi’
Senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh on Saturday said he is hopeful chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan will respectfully relocate Rajghat, the Gandhi Samadhi on the banks of Narmada in Barwani district, which has ashes of Mahatma Gandhi, Kasturba Gandhi and Mahadev Desai Gandhi’s secretary, to a more suitable place as the area will get submerged in Narmada waters.
Singh said this while addressing an all-party meeting at Nisarpur in Dhar district on Saturday. Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) had organised the all party meet against “forcible eviction” of thousands of families in the affected villages and one township without complete rehabilitation of the Sardar Sarovar dam affected people.
In 1965, Gandhian Kashinath Trivedi had brought the ashes of Gandhi, Kasturba and Mahadev Desai and set up a samadhi in their memory in Barwani.
With gates of Sardar Sarovar Dam closed last month, many areas in the four districts of Madhya Pradesh will get submerged with Narmada waters as the rain water swells the water level in Narmada.
Singh said he was hopeful that Chouhan will relocate the samadhi despite the fact that “Shivraj Gandhi ji ke vichardhara se nahi…Godse ke vichardhara se hai (Shivraj is not a follower of Gandhi’s philosophy….he is follower of Godse’s ideology).
Singh appealed to the Supreme Court to review its decision regarding rehabilitation of the dam affected by July 31. “There is a 2009 direction of the MP government that says that till the gram sabha (of the village) doesn’t say that all affected people have been rehabilitated, there will be no further work on the project. There has been no reversal on this direction by the state government till now” he said.
Communist Party of India (CPI) leader D Raja, in his address, condemned the BJP government at Centre and state level, Raja said “if Narendra Modi has some respect for the constitution and democracy then he should follow NWDTA (Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal Award 1979) and give justice to the lakhs of people …There is a need of collective struggle and people of the Narmada valley should not think that they are alone”.