A Vigilance video shows an individual hitting a statue of Mahatma Gandhi with a sledge on Tuesday, before breaking the head off and…
In a likely hate crime, anonymous individuals damaged a handmade statue of Mahatma Gandhi with a sledge at a Hindu temple after watching it earlier this month, media reports said on Friday.
A Vigilance video shows an individual hitting a statue of Mahatma Gandhi with a sledge on Tuesday, before breaking the head off and overthrowing it. Then, a group of six trampled on it and switched turns hammering the statue before throwing it off, the report said.
“To watch them following us like this is unbearable,” Lakhram Maharaj, the founder of Shri Tulsi Mandir, located in south Richmond Hill, said. Lakhram Maharaj found that the Mahatma Gandhi statue was destroyed on Wednesday morning.
The phrase “dog” was spray painted in front of the temple and below the block, it said. A similar Mahatma Gandhi statue was destroyed two weeks earlier, investigating officers said.
“When the Mahatma Gandhi statue was destroyed, that broke all our beliefs and it’s worrying for the community,” Assembly member Jenifer Rajkumar said in the report. The New York Police Department is looking into both the events as possible hate crimes, media reports said.
Lakhram Maharaj said that several in the community are now scared off from visiting the temple. I cannot show the audience I am concerned because if I show them that I am concerned and I am not strong, then how will they be strong? Lakhram Maharaj said.
The temple officials could not bear to change the Mahatma Gandhi statue as it was handmade and cost about USD 4,000, the report said. “I want to know why they did that,” Lakhram Maharaj said. This is not the first time a statue of Mahatma Gandhi has been dishonoured in the US.
In February this year, an 8-foot-high Mahatma Gandhi statue, situated in Manhattan’s Union Square, was vandalised by anonymous people. In December 2022, Khalistani followers dishonoured a Mahatma Gandhi statue in Washington, DC, in front of the Indian Embassy.
The former White House Press Secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, called the incident terrible.
