The history behind Lenin Chhak Balasore
The Mahatma Gandhi and Lenin are the two greatest personalities in history . The great personalities have never met each other, but in Dandi a village near Basta of Balasore district has both these great leaders rubbing elbows . Both the statues are put side by side of the road in Dandi village since 1984.
There is an interesting story behind the two statues. The area was a bastion of the Communist Party for years. Sometime during the heydays of Indo-Russian co-operation, the local unit of the Party invited the Consul General of Russia at Kolkata to put up a statue of Lenin in the village. When D-Day came near, the babus at Bhubaneswar saw red. They put a halt to the programme, but the minor diplomatic storm in the teacup made the Centre intervene. It was finally decided that the Consul General would inaugurate two statues, one of the Mahatma along with Lenin. A same size statue of the Mahatma was hurriedly procured and set up along with Lenin’s statue. There was some dissension in this among the Reds, but finally consensus prevailed.
The place has since been known as the Lenin Chhak. This is perhaps the only place in the world where the apostle of peace and the radical communist share space. The pedestals are on two small platforms, a distance of 20 feet from each other, set up in the premises of a now abandoned school, on the edge of the rice fields. Both are of similar height, looking ahead in their typical depictions.
Mahatma Gandhi , The Father of the nation was born on October 2, 1869, in Porbandar, India, Mahatma Gandhi studied law and advocated for the civil rights of Indians, both at home under British rule and in South Africa. Gandhi became a leader of India’s independence movement, organizing boycotts against British institutions in peaceful forms of civil disobedience. He was killed by a fanatic in 1948.
“The devotion of such titans of spirit as Lenin to an Ideal must bear fruit. The nobility of his selflessness will be an example through centuries to come, and his Ideal will reach perfection.”- Mahatma Gandhi.
Vladimir Lenin founded the Russian Communist Party, led the Bolshevik Revolution and was the architect of the Soviet state. He was the posthumous source of “Leninism,” the doctrine codified and conjoined with Marx’s works by Lenin’s successors to form Marxism-Leninism, which became the Communist worldview. He has been regarded as the greatest revolutionary leader and thinker since Marx.
“There is no end to the acts of violence and plunder which goes under the name of the British system of government in India. The infamous sentence pronounced by the British jackals on the Indian democrat Tilak, will result in a political mass struggle. The British regime in India is doomed”. – V. I. Lenin
