The White Elephants of Uttar Pradesh

By Ritika at 29 June, 2009, 4:45 am

Wikipedia describes a white elephant as a valuable possession which its owner cannot dispose and whose cost (particularly cost of upkeep) is out of proportion to its usefulness. In financial terms, maintaining a white elephant is just a cost centre which will never incur any revenue. And in political terms, it means running the current government in Uttar Pradesh by Mayawati.

Our dear Behenji is on a memorial inauguration spree in Lucknow. Even though there is a PIL filed by a lawyer against the alleged misuse of UP government funds on the memorials, 15 memorials were inaugurated last week so that a Supreme Court order would not be able to spoil the Memorial party. I read in an article that as per the Lucknow Development Authority, the statues of Mayawati and Kanshi Ram at various places in Lucknow cost an enormous Rs 6.68 crore and marble elephants at Ambedkar Memorial cost Rs 52 crore. Also, an amount of Rs 90 crore was allocated for the beautification of Kanshi Ram Park. I won’t be surprised if UP will soon borrow the title ‘Land of Elephants’ from Thailand or rather it will be the ‘Land of White elephants’. For those who came in late, elephant is the symbol of Mayawati’s party, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).

So acute is the egocentric behaviour of Mayawati that she has reportedly pulled down as her statue at a public place as it appears dwarfed by the figure of her political mentor, Kanshi Ram standing alongside. And now she intends to reconstruct it again. So we are basically doling out huge amounts of tax money for feeding the egos of our boisterous politicians. Mayawati argues that Congress has spent a lot of money building roads and memorials after the Gandhis and Nehrus, so why are they making an issue when the poor Dalit wants to do the same? So while the Congress and BSP engage in an competition to dump our nation with gigantic white elephants we can just pay for their maintenance.

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Categories : Politics & Society