Residents of Uttar Pradesh’s Shahjahanpur on Wednesday took out a rally to protest the state government’s “insensitivity” towards the statues of freedom fighters that were damaged during the implementation of a beautification project on Monday.

To placate the angry protesters who vowed to continue the agitation, the Shahjahanpur municipal authority has promised to restore the statues of Ram Prasad Bismil, Ashfaqullah Khan, Thakur Roshan Singh and Prem Kishan Khanna soon.

The state government has suspended two municipal engineers under whose supervision the statues were broken by a construction firm.

Tasked with beautifying the town hall of Shahjahanpur Nagar Nigam, Lucknow-based Fly Infratech had deployed bulldozers on Monday (March 23) to raze some structures, but damaged the statues that were installed in 1972.

The incident coincided with the 95th Martyrs’ Day to honour freedom fighters Bhagat Singh, Shivram Rajguru and Sukhdev Thapar, who were hanged by the British in 1931. All of them were members of the Hindustan Republican Association.

Their colleagues Chandrashekhar Azad, Bismil, Khan, Singh and Rajendra Lahiri had robbed government funds from a moving train in Lucknow’s Kakori on August 9, 1925. Azad managed to escape, but the others were hanged in different jails between December 17 and December 19, 1927. Many more revolutionaries were arrested and sent to prison.

Khanna, a contractor from Shahjahanpur who owned a licensed revolver, was arrested and awarded a five-year jail term because Bismil had used his revolver and cartridges to execute the Kakori train robbery in which a passenger had accidentally died.
He was elected as an MP from Shahjahanpur in 1962 and 1967.

Shahjahanpur district magistrate Dharmendra Pratap Singh said they had filed a case against the firm for damaging government property and blacklisted it.

“The government has also recommended suspension of Vikram Jeet and Pradeep Kumar, assistant engineer and junior engineer of Nagar Nigam, respectively, because the work was going on under their supervision,” he said.

Ashwini Kumar Singh, a Shahjahanpur resident, claimed that they had warned the officers on the spot not to desecrate the statues.

“They kept saying that they have an order to remove the statues. They broke the statues and dumped the rubble among a pile of construction materials. We had requested them to keep the broken pieces and reinstall them once the beautification project was completed, but they threatened us with police action,” said Singh, who took part in a dharna against the state government.

“They were destroying the statues of revolutionaries when we had gathered there to remember them. The officers on the spot kept ignoring us until the media came,”
he added.