Mayavati’s new statue (left) stands beside Kanshi Ram’s in Lucknow. (PTI)

New Delhi, June 22: Mayavati has this month had a 12-foot bronze statue of herself replaced with one that’s three feet taller because the figures of her heroes, B.R. Ambedkar and Kanshi Ram, towered above it.

The bill for the two Mayavati statues: around Rs 4 crore.

A statue of Shivaji taller than the Statue of Liberty is to come up in Mumbai, already dotted with smaller figures of the Maratha warrior king.

The estimated cost: more than Rs 100 crore.

In August, a Bhagat Singh statue will be unveiled in the Parliament complex.

But in 1961, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had turned down a proposal to install statues of Mahatma Gandhi at big railway stations.

“The other day, there was a question in the Lok Sabha about statues of Mahatma Gandhi being put up at important railway stations. I was taken aback by this and reacted rather strongly against the proposal.... I am inclined to think that it will not be a good thing to put up these statues at railway stations,” he wrote to his railway minister Jagjivan Ram, recently declassified notes of the Prime Minister’s Office under Nehru and Indira Gandhi reveal.

In the light of this directive, requests pending with the railways were not proceeded with.

Jagjivan Ram brought up the subject again in 1968 when Indira was Prime Minister and he was food and agriculture minister.

A note from the Prime Minister’s secretariat under Indira cites how Nehru avoided this proposal, and how an exception was made in the case of Lokmanya Tilak and Subhas Chandra Bose in later years.

The then powerful Y.B. Chavan argued that “Tilak’s statue (in Pune) would only be a replacement for an early statue of King George VI.” As for Bose’s statue in Gomoh, the Netaji memorial committee in Dhanbad had requested one saying “the station bears the last footprints of Netaji before his escape from India.” The request was granted.

The note further says: “Proper maintenance of the statues and preserving the sanctity of the premises might also not be possible as instances are not lacking where statues are deliberately disfigured by unsocial elements and unwantonly polluted by birds and beasts. Further, installation of the statues on the railway station premises is likely to cause congestion.”

The declassified papers available with the National Archives reveal that demands for a bust of the second President, S. Radhakrishnan, were rejected on the grounds that it would be too expensive.

Immediately after Radhakrishnan’s term ended, there were calls that a bust made by Clara Quien — for which the President had given sittings — be installed in Rashtrapati Bhavan.

Kailash Chandra, the then commissioner for social welfare, wrote to the Rajya Sabha secretary and Indira’s office, recommending that the statue be put up in Rashtrapati Bhavan or Parliament House.

The PMO forwarded the request to Rashtrapati Bhavan under President Zakir Hussain. The demand was rejected.

A letter dated March 22, 1968, from V. Phadke, then deputy secretary to the President, to Indira’s private secretary S.P. Khanna said: “We have had the matter examined in our secretariat. The position is we already have two bronze busts of Dr Radhakrishnan in Rashtrapati Bhavan and so it will not be possible for us to acquire a third one at such a high price.” The price: Rs 25,000.