Delhi: Within seconds of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi laying the foundation stone for a statue that will be the biggest in the world - twice as big as the 93-metre-tall Statue of Liberty - and that will change the Mumbai skyline for ever, battlelines were being drawn between critics and supporters of the multimillion-dollar project.

For the ceremony, Modi sailed in a hovercraft four kilometres off the coast of Mumbai on Christmas Eve to the piece of reclaimed land far out in the Arabian Sea where the 192-metre-high statue of the 17th-century Hindu warrior Shivaji will come up by 2019.

For years, Shivaji fought the Mughals, Muslim emperors who ruled India before the British and who built the Taj Mahal. He created his own kingdom in the western state of Maharashtra, where Mumbai is located. For many Hindus, he is the embodiment of all that is good about Hindu culture.

Modi's party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has been fighting a cultural struggle to promote Hindu traditions and icons it believes have been belittled or marginalised by the liberal establishment ever since India became independent in 1947.