India to get her own 'liberty' statue soon

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According to Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, at 309 feet, the statue of Maratha warrior-hero Chhatrapati Shivaji on a horse, cast in bronze, which the state government plans to erect off the coast of Mumbai in the Arabian Sea, would be a shade higher than New York's icon.

''We are also planning a lights and sound show and a museum so that people get to know Shivaji, the king and the administrator,'' Deshmukh said.

The state government has already zeroed in on a small island measuring 30,000 square meters, about 2 km away from the city's coast, where the Rs.100 crore ($24 million) statue will be set up and plans to operate a ferry service along the city's coast.

However, the government's plans has not gone down well with the people of Mumbai who feel that the move is merely aimed at winning votes with the local assembly polls round the corner. Some people have also criticized the government for being wasteful, as the money could have been used for developing the infrastructure of the city, which becomes submerged under water every monsoon.

Others believe that the statue will spoil the aesthetic beauty of Mumbai's most famous promenade - the Marine Drive.

The statue, once completed will become one of the top ten tallest statues in the world. The government hopes to unveil the statue to the public by 2010.

Unlike the Statue of Liberty which became a symbol of hope to the millions of immigrants who sailed by her to begin new lives in the US, the Shivaji statue, once completed, will probably remind people of the nativist political parties in Mumbai, who are resisting immigration into Mumbai by Indians from states other than Maharashtra.

Of late, the Shivaji icon has come to be associated with the militant right-wing Maharashtra group, Shiv Sena, which demands more should be done to promote the rights of "local" people in the state rather than "outsiders" and threatens to oust the immigrants from the state.

ABOUT CHHATRAPATI SHIVAJI

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