Ahmedabad-based social activist Roshan Shah has dashed off an angry letter to the police in Gandhinagar and the Gujarat police chief.

Ahmedabad — A naked sculpture of Mahatma Gandhi displayed in a museum of life and works the Father of the Nation during the recent Pravasi Bharatiya Divas celebrations in Gujarat’s capital city named after Bapu has stirred up a hornet’s nest in the state of his birth.

Ahmedabad-based social activist Roshan Shah has dashed off an angry letter to the police in Gandhinagar near Ahmedad and the Gujarat police chief, urging them to register an FIR against the state government, the chief minister, the museum organisers and the sculptor for installing the distasteful model in the name of modern art.

“The ‘offensive’ statue of a great man like the Mahatma had hurt my sentiments. How shall we evaluate this? A Gandhi nude?”, he asked Khaleej Times.

Gujarat Congress leader Dr Manish Doshi said that Winston Churchil might have referred to Gandhiji as a `half-naked fakir but the sculpture in the ‘Dandi Kutir’ thronged daily by countless visitors showing the Mahatma in the buff, bending to pick up salt for breaking the unfair ‘salt tax’ law of the British was an insult to the apostle of peace and non-violence. “The sculptor of this statue have discarded even the dhoti he used to wear, so much so that the sculpture appears to be that of a naked man”, said Aam Aadmi Party’s Harshil Nayak.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a former Gujarat Chief Minister, had inaugurated the state-of-the-art Dandi Kutir as also a ‘Salt Mountain’ to commemorate the Salt Satyagraha of 1930 after opening the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas celebrations to mark the centenary of Bapu Mahatma Gandhi’s return to India in 1915.

The Rs 2-million sculpture has been chiseled by a UK-based artist.