Gandhian’s statue in Champaran village at the mercy of river

MURLI-BHARAWA (WEST CHAMPARAN): Four years after CM Nitish Kumar unveiled a life-size statue of

Pandit Raj Kumar Shukla

, the Champaran farmer who had doggedly persuaded Mahatma Gandhi to visit Champaran, on the banks of the Pandai river in this village in West Champaran, the festivities of the centenary celebrations of the Champaran Satyagraha remain etched in betrayal for the villagers.

“We had pooled in money to buy land for this memorial for Shuklaji and his associate Sant Raut,” Manish Tiwary, a resident villager, told this newspaper even as a crowd collected on the slushy banks of the Pandai.

“But you can see none of the promises was kept,” Lal Babu Yadav points to the Pandai having just receded from around the canopies holding the statues of Shukla and Raut. “The CM had promised a lot, including a park, here. These statues themselves may get washed away any day by the Pandai which erupts suddenly and menacingly in monsoon,” he rued.

A black tiled plaque commemorating Shukla’s role in the Champaran Satyagraha manages to stand still in the slush, Gandhiji’s portrait washed away though. “They had pasted a paper photo of Bapu. Rain and sun peeled it away,” Suruj Yadav, another villager, recalled.

Following Yadav’s pointed finger, eyes veer to thatched hutments crumbled by the fury of the Pandai. A bullock cart comes into view. At the helm is Mahendra Yasav. The cart is laden with his worldly possessions: a couple of tin trunks, a small wooden almirah, table and his sparse larder of grains. At the rear of the cart is Yadav’s world: his wife and two little children.

The villager’s home has been devoured by the river. He is migrating to higher ground.

The heritage walks organised in 2017 now seem a cruel joke on the villagers. That a walk on the ground that Gandhi blazed from Narkatiaganj to this village en route to Bhitiharwa in 1917 is difficult to tread is more than figuratively speaking. Leaving the car where the metalled road has been breached, the trudge through the current onto about 200 metres of tar meanders into a road untouched since Gandhiji walked these parts.