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| Narendra Modi's ministers on nation |
| Narendra Modi's ministers on nationwide iron hunt for giant Sardar Patel statue
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| INDIA
, 10-December-2013
3:57:10 AM |
| Narendra Modi's government is travelling across India on a drive to collect iron for a giant statue of Sardar Patel being built in Gujarat.
The 182-metre statue of India's iron man, tipped to be the world's tallest, is coming up in the middle of the Narmada river.
Mr Modi, who is running for prime minister in 2014, had announced in October that 700 tonnes of iron would be collected from five lakh villages for the statue.
For this, Gujarat ministers, bureaucrats and IPS officers are visiting states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Punjab and Orissa, carrying specially designed boxes with the message "Sardar ne desh ko ek banaya, hum desh ko shresth banayenge (Sardar Patel united the nation, we will make it the best)."
Today, senior Gujarat minister and government spokesperson Nitin Patel is in Uttar Pradesh capital Lucknow along with a battery of IPS and IAS officers for the drive. "It's a mission meant for the Iron man of the country. It's not just Gujarat's initiative but the country as a whole,'' Mr Patel said.
A few days ago, another minister, Bhupendrasinh Chudasama, visited Chandigarh to rope in volunteers for the iron-collection drive.
The Sardar Patel statue is seen by the Congress as an unsubtle attempt by Mr Modi and his BJP to appropriate the legacy of Sardar Patel, who was first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's home minister and a lifelong Congressman.
In October, the BJP and the Congress battled to outdo each other in claiming the iconic leader as their own, with even Prime Minister Manmohan Singh saying at an event he attended with Mr Modi that he was "proud and happy to belong to a political party to which Sardar Patel was attached
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