A few of the branches of this tree have been cut off to make space for the statue. Picture by Ashwinee Pati

Bhubaneswar, April 28: Ever since Biju Patnaik died in 1997, there has been a profusion of his statues in the state, his followers perpetuating his memory with due diligence.

While this has hardly ever led to any grumbling, what has raised eyebrows is a plan to install an image of his wife, Gyan Patnaik, mother of chief minister Naveen Patnaik, at a prominent location here.

The 11-feet statue is almost ready to be placed at the entrance of Unit-IV Government Hospital. The bronze statue of Gyan, one of the earliest women pilots of the country who died in 2009, has been chiselled at a cost of Rs 5 lakh.

Sources said that while the culture department placed the order for the statue, the location was decided upon by the general administration department, home, Bhubaneswar Development Authority and the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation.

This is certain to be seen as an attempt at perpetuating dynastic politics with the statues of husband and wife coming up anywhere in the state for the first time. The question bound to be asked is what Gyan Patnaik’s contribution has been to the state even though her daring deed of accompanying her husband during World War II to rescue Indonesian leader Sukarno from Dutch-besieged Java is still remembered.

As far as Odisha is concerned, statues of many politicians, freedom fighters and academics dot its landscape, the most prominent among them being that of Biju babu, Mahatma Gandhi, Pandit Gobanadhu Dash, Madhusudan Das, Harekrushna Mahtab and B.R. Ambedkar, the last being a relatively new phenomenon. In the case of Mahtab, his wife, Subhadra won the Assembly elections once but no one has ever made an attempt to put her on a pedestal.