Source: www.ft.com
LUCKNOW, UTTAR PRADESH, INDIA, May 23, 2009: On the banks of the Gomti River outside Lucknow, an elaborate memorial is being constructed in honor of Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar, the erudite hero of India’s “untouchables,” the Dalits. Large statues of Dr. Ambedkar and other Dalit heroes look down on giant sandstone elephants that line the walkway to a lotus-shaped temple, which contains statues depicting the life of Ambedkar, a Dalit who was a key architect of independent India’s egalitarian constitution. The 130-acre compound is the special project of chief minister Kumari Mayawati, herself a Dalit and the subject of one of the larger-than-life statues inside the temple.
The Ambedkar Memorial is just one of several major monuments conceived by Mayawati that have risen at an almost unbelievable pace over the past two years in Lucknow. The lotus temple itself was originally built in 1995; since May 2007, it has been completely remodeled and vastly expanded. Across town, on a 30-acre compound along the road leading to Lucknow’s airport, Mayawati is erecting a massive memorial to her mentor Kanshi Ram, who died in 2006. Just across the road from that, another temple is being built to honor Buddha, whose faith Ambedkar and many other Dalits embraced in rejection of Hinduism’s caste system. Still another of these monuments is just getting under way in Noida, a district of Delhi.
Mayawati’s attempts to boost her fellow Dalits’ confidence and prestige by monument building are also criticized as a diversion of funds that could have been used for housing and welfare programs that would more directly uplift the Dalit community. It is unclear how much the monument building is costing the state. A contractor stated that the Kanshi Ram Memorial alone has cost US$142m. Harish Chandr, a Dalit, says that this is a historic opportunity to improve the lives of the dalits that is being squandered: “Instead of taking advantage of that opportunity to improve the lives of the people, this is belying the hope of the downtrodden.”