The statue will be five times higher than Rio de Janeiro's Christ the Redeemer at 38 metres, and will cost $US525 million ($726 million). The BJP is also building one for another of its favourite men, Vallabhbhai Patel, India's first home minister.
For the critics, these statues are part of the "sectarian" and "divisive" Hindu nationalist agenda, designed to stir up hatred of the Muslim minority among Hindus and to encourage a feeling of cultural pre-eminence in the latter. Moreover, they ask, what use is a statue with so much poverty, pathetic infrastructure, inadequate hospitals, bad schools, illiteracy, and child labour? ... As in any country, the statues erected in public places in India reflect the preferences of the ruling elite. Those of Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi predominate. You don't see many – or any – statues of dalits, the 160 million Hindus who belong to the lowest caste.
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For some Indians, the fact that the Shivaji statue is being built at all is commendable – at least its sheer size alone will be something to be proud of. The lack of modern buildings or monuments of note - the kind that become a famous landmark and put a city on the world map – is a source of chagrin for architects.
Satirist Gautam Bhatia is not enamoured with the idea, saying it is like the statues of Lenin put up by Russian Communists.
"The political purpose implicit in such public art denudes the piece of all artistic merit. That a political party endorses it in its manifesto and is willing to shower funds for its construction reduces Shivaji to puny irrelevance," he said.
Well-known sculptor Shakti Maira agreed: "Spending this huge sum of money and changing the Mumbai skyline for ever, could be done for a work that has a bigger and more inspiring vision than dear old Shivaji," said Maira.
The statue sculptors, Anil Sutar and his 92-year-old father Ram in Noida, are unruffled by the controversy. Though their design of the warrior, shown on a horse and holding aloft a sword, has been approved, they have yet to start work on it.
"I don't want to get into the politics. We are just sculptors. All I can say is that if people had worried about how much the Taj Mahal would cost, it would never have been built," said Anil Sutar.
