The ongoing duel between the Bihar BJP and Nitish Kumar escalated further to divine limits on Thursday when a BJP leader dismissed the comparison between party’s PM candidate Narendra Modi and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar over size of the proposed Ram temple in Bihar and statue of Sardar Patel in Gujarat. Kumar on Wednesday had unveiled model of world’s largest Hindu temple in Patna.
“In a section of media there is a comparison between the proposed world’s tallest statue of Sardar Patel in Gujarat and largest Hindu temple in Bihar as if there is a competition between the two leaders. I think it’s all baseless,” said senior Bihar BJP leader Sushil Modi in his latest tweet.
The Bihar BJP leaders, of late, are embroiled in spat with the ruling party JD(U) and its leader, including Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. The war of words apparently has been reaching new heights every day.
“The building of Virat Ramayan Mandir in Bihar has nothing to do with the State Government and its Chief Minister whereas the construction of world’s tallest statue of Sardar Patel in Gujarat is the brainchild of Chief Minister Narendra Modi and sponsored by the Gujarat Government,” Modi said in his tweet.
For the construction of world’s tallest statue of Sardat Patel, the Gujarat Chief Minister and BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, earlier, had appealed to the farmers of the country to donate iron of their defunct ploughshare to be used in the statue.
The president of the BJP’s farmer’s organisation had recently visited Bihar to monitor the process of collecting iron for the purpose of statue making.
It is said that the statue of the “Iron Man” Sardar Patel would be even taller than the Statue of liberty and would be named as “Statue of Unity”. The BJP seemingly is quite excited with the project of Sardar Patel’s statue and has involved its farmer cell for the iron collection.
Meanwhile, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Wednesday unveiled model of the Virat Ramayan temple proposed to be built by the Hanuman Temple trust at Kesaria in East Champaran.
The proposed Ramayan temple will be of 2,800 feet long, 1,400 feet wide and 405 feet high and is said to be the brainchild of chairman of the Bihar Religious Trust Board Acharya Kishore Kunal.
“The State Government and Nitish Kumar has nothing to do with it as it’s been the brainchild of Acharya Kishore Kunal, a retired police official,” tweeted BJP leader Sushil Modi. The planning of the temple has been done by a leading architect from Gujarat and will be built at a cost estimated between Rs 300 crore to Rs 500 crore.
Swami Swaroopanand Saraswati Maharaj, Shankaracharya of Dwarika was also present on the occasion. It is said that the proposed Virat Ramayan Temple would be nearly double the height of Cambodia’s famous Angkor Wat Temple, the largest and tallest in the world.
The proposed project of Ramayan Hindu temple of Bihar would be completed by 2015, said the temple authorities.
“As chairman of Bihar State Board of Religious Trusts, I have been involved in the construction and restoration of hundreds of temples, but there was a deep desire in me to build a grand temple like this,” said Acharya Kishore Kunal while adding that “in March last year, this idea struck me quite strongly and I decided to build the world’s largest Hindu temple”.
Though the project is being funded and built by Hanuman Temple, its inauguration by Bihar CM Nitish Kumar led to comparisons with the recent foundation stone-laying ceremony of Sardar Patel’s statue in Gujarat.