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A statue of Mahatma Gandhi in a park in the US state of California has been vandalised, broken, and ripped from the base by unknown miscreants, shocking and outrageous Indian Americans across the country, who have requested that officials investigate it as a hate crime incident.
In the Central Park of the City of Davis in Northern California, the 6-ft tall, 650-pound (294 kg) bronze statue of Gandhi appeared to have been sawed off at the ankles and half of its face was severed and missing, according to local Davis Enterprise daily reports.
A park staff member found the vandalised statue of Mahatma Gandhi in the early hours of the morning of January 27, police said.
Lucas Frerichs, Davis City councilman, said that the statue is being removed and will be stored in a safe place until it can be evaluated. The Sacramento Bee reported that investigators are still uncertain about when exactly the statue was torn down or what the motive might have been.
“Seeing a portion of the people in Davis as a cultural icon, we take it very seriously,” Deputy Chief Paul Doroshov of the Davis Police Department was quoted by the newspaper as saying.
The Gandhi statue, donated to the city of Davis by the Indian government, was installed by the city council four years ago in the midst of protests by anti-Gandhi and anti-India organisations.
Organization for Minorities in India (OFMI), which led these protests and opposed the statue’s installation. However, the City of Davis voted to go ahead with the installation. Since then, the OFMI has started a campaign to remove the statue of Gandhi.
Deep anguish and shock at the incident have been expressed by Indian Americans.
“For many years now, many anti-India and Hindu radical organisations such as OFMI and other Khalistani separatists have created an atmosphere of hatred,” Guarang Desai of the Friends of India Society International said (FISI).
“Not only did they conduct hate campaigns against Indian icons, they were at the forefront of attempts to push Hindu phobia and erase India from school textbooks in California,” Desai said.
The OFMI was part of a campaign in 2016 to remove from the sixth and seventh grade California school textbooks the references to ‘India’ and replace them with ‘South Asia.’ The California Department of Education dropped the controversial changes after massive protests from parents and students.
The Vandalism Was Praised On Twitter By A Pro-Khalistan Group In California, Who Shared Photos Of The Destroyed Statue, And Others Who Stated “Today Is A Good Day.”
This is not the first time a Gandhi statue has been desecrated. A Mahatma Gandhi statue in Washington, DC was desecrated by Khalistani supporters in front of the Indian Embassy in December 2020.
