India’s Monuments Men

At the inauguration of the National War Memorial in Delhi on February 25, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took a couple of digs at the Congress for having failed to complete a project decades in the making. His opponents found his politicking distasteful, arguing that the solemn occasion merited something more profound and unifying than just another stump speech. With elections close, the BJP is hoping to spin the escalating regional tensions into political gold, capitalising on the jingoism that becomes a feature of the national ‘mood’ in times of war. The war memorial, though, was a minor project, in both cost and scale, compared to the new statues, symbols of the Modi government’s muscular ‘new India’.

15.5 METRES

high obelisk is the centrepiece of the new National War Memorial in Delhi, built on 40 acres at a cost of Rs 167 crore

25,942

soldiers who died in various postIndependence conflicts have their names inscribed on 16 ‘honour’ walls at the National War Memorial, Delhi

`2,989 CRORE

spent on ‘Statue of Unity’ built in honour of Sardar Patel, the ‘iron man of India’, who, the Modi government says, has been unjustly neglected by the Congress

182 METRES

height of Sardar Patel statue, making it the tallest in the world; 4 of top 10 tallest statues are in Japan, 2 in China; the Statue of Liberty, US, is 93 metres

72

villages, hit by the construction of the statue of Sardar Patel, cooked no food for a day in mourning; the compensation was Rs 7.5 lakh per hectare for those who didn’t want land in exchange

210 METRES

height of Shivaji statue being built in Mumbai; the 126 metre statue will sit atop an 84 metre pedestal to make it the world’s tallest, when complete; estimated cost: Rs 3,644 crore

221 METRES

height of proposed Ram statue in Ayodhya (151 metre statue, 50 metre pedestal, 20 metre umbrella), said CM Yogi Adityanath in 2018