On Aug. 26, a 35-foot statue of the Maharashtrian icon and warrior-king, Shivaji, collapsed in Rajkot, Sindhudurg, triggering a political storm. Mumbai, the financial capital of India, is also the capital of this important western state, with its long coastline on the Arabian Sea.
Fortunately, no lives were lost.
Three months ago, I published a column on the collapse of a giant, illegal hoarding in Mumbai. The 120 x 120ft billboard crashed to the ground on May 13, killing 15 and injuring 75 people.
In the last paragraph, I had warned: “Right during election time, such a tragedy should propel us towards more responsible and responsive governance. Not just winning elections by hook or by crook, but truly serving the interests of the ordinary citizens of our country should be our top priority.”
Why? Because I couldn’t help but read the event symbolically: “Just as this giant hoarding collapsed, our high and mighty elected leaders, who turn a blind eye to the suffering, even loss of lives, of ordinary women and men, will also come crashing down one day.”
What happened in the 2024 general elections? Maharashtra, which sends forty-eight members to India’s powerful Lok Sabha or lower house, next only to Uttar Pradesh, made a poor showing as far as both the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) are concerned. Out of forty-eight seats, the NDA won only seventeen. The BJP won only nine of the twenty-eight seats it contested.
Let’s compare this with its performance in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. The NDA had won forty-three of the forty-eight seats contested. The BJP’s tally was twenty-three out of twenty-five. This year, the NDA’s tally went down by twenty-four and the BJP’s by fourteen.
A lot of political machinations had happened just a year before the elections, with the BJP breaking its former ally, the Shiv Sena, and weaning away its rebel faction, led by Eknath Shinde, into its fold. Shinde became the new Chief Minister of the state less than a year before the general elections.
This time around, it is not a giant hoarding but the highly publicised statue of the state’s tallest icon, Shivaji, that fell to the ground. One portal reported that the statue fell because “nuts and bolts were rusted.”
Chief Minister Shinde attributed the fall to high winds, which he cited were in the range of 45 kilometres an hour. When the giant hoarding buckled, again, winds were blamed, reportedly 60 kilometres an hour.
But, as I argued, those erecting the massive billboard would have known about wind speeds and the weather conditions, as would those responsible for installing the Shivaji statue. Blaming the weather or wind speeds is simply not convincing. Rusted nuts and bolts, which really suggests negligence and corruption, seem the more likely causes.
The other similarity in both these mishaps were prior warnings, both by civic authorities and observers as well as ordinary people, who had noticed that something serious was amiss.
In the case of the statue, there had been several reports of its deteriorating condition. The other similarity is, of course, the attempts of the political leadership to pass on the buck.
Endangering public safety
With the hoarding, the blame was shifted to the Railways, which owned the land on which the illegal advertisement had been raised. This time around, it is the Navy which has been held responsible, for the statue is on land under its control.
The question that is not asked is if the Navy had initiated the structure or was it the political leadership of the state? Clearly, the answer is the latter. After all, the high-profile statue had had a high-profile inauguration on Dec. 4, 2023, by none other than Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself. But in less than eight months, it fell apart.
Quite predictably, the Maharashtra government has gone into a damage-control overdrive. A First Information Report (FIR) has been lodged against the sculptor-contractor, Jaydeep Apte, and his structural consultant, Chetan Patil.
Both have been charged with fraud, endangering public safety, and even attempted murder! And the politicians, who derived advantages from the statue’s erection and unveiling? Nothing at all has been brought against them!
Once again, however, I cannot help interpreting the fall of the statue symbolically. The rusted nuts and bolts, the poor quality of materials and workmanship, the faulty design and erection, the corruption and collusion — all point to the deeper rot in the state.
If they could not protect the statue of the historic hero they swear by, after whom every major airport, train terminus, and iconic building and monument in the state is named, what or whom do those in power actually stand for or represent?
