Lal Bahadur Shastry gets a raw deal again

By SNV Sudhir/Visakhapatnam

Yet another year in succession, the second prime minister of the country and freedom fighter Lal Bahadur Sasstry was neglected on his birth anniversary. One of the reason could be his birth anniversary coinciding with that of the father of nation Mahatma Gandhi.. No doubt Mahatma has his own place in the hearts of every Indian and his statue in every Gulli of the country. In the city of destiny, Sastry is humiliated in every place in the city perhaps not done in any part of the country. All the newspapers and electronic media beamed picures of netas garlanding the statue of Gandhi but not one on Shastryji. The netas who has to follow the foot steps of Lal Bahadur Shastry for his political values not even observed his birthday. Few days ago a group of senior citizens of the city were shocked to notice that the only Lal Bahadur Shastry’s statue of the city was missing from its place opposite to Municipal Corporation. Later when they probed into the issue they found out that the statue was removed from its place for some reasons by Corporation authorities. The group submitted a letter to the district administration and the corporation authorities on September 22 saying the statue was missing from the place and requested the administration to install the statue temporarily by October 2nd to garland Shastryji’s statue on his 101 birth anniversary. Shockingly there was no response.“We gave a letter to the district administration and the municipal corporation authorities ten days before so that they can arrange by October 2nd. But they kept mum” said Thynala Vijay Kumar a former Congress corporator. Another interesting fact is that this statue was brought from the Town hall of old town in 2003, as it was not taken care by anyone there. The then Mayor of the city Rajana Ramani unveiled the statue opposite to Municipal Corporation. “We tried hard to get this statue from the Town hall to this place as it was neglected there but there was no use. Now, the authorities vanished the statue from here also. I don’t know why this is happening only to Shastryji’s statue. The same statue was neglected twice which was the only one for the entire city,” said Pappu Sri Ram Murthy, a 65 year oldman said“We thought that the authorities will be temporarily installing Shashtryji’s statue aside of the existing Gandhiji’s statue opposite to Municipal Corporation, so that we could celebrate both birth anniversaries at a time” said Dhamma Nageswara Rao a 70 year old man.Visakhapatnam city has several statues of various personalities on the beach road including one of Rajiv Gandhi’s. The Municipal Commissioner N Srikanth said, “The statue is in a safe place. Because of some road alignment works we had to remove the statue. We will be erecting it after December as the alignment work completes by that time.”