In the first-ever assault on the Vidhana Soudha, built by the former Chief Minister Kengal Hanumanthaiya, a wall in the chamber allotted to Shankar Patil Munenakoppa, Political Secretary to Chief Minister Jagadish Shettar, was demolished on Tuesday as it was not “Vaastu compliant”.
Eye-witness
The changes in the Room no. 340 A allotted to Mr. Shankar Patil Munenakoppa was detected by the former Congress MP Tejaswini Gowda, who had gone there to oversee the progress of the construction of Namma Metro work. The room facing the High Court building is on the third floor.
“I heard the sound of demolition and was shocked to see the desecration of the structure. The wall was demolished to fix a door in a direction supposed to be auspicious according to Vaastu Shastra,” she told The Hindu .
Ms. Gowda said that she took the contractor to task for demolishing the wall and demanded whether he had obtained permission from the authorities concerned. When he did not give an answer, she asked him to stop the illegal demolition. The Congress leader said that she was going to complain to Chief Minister Jagadish Shettar, Legislative Assembly Speaker K.G. Bopaiah, who was the custodian of the building housing the two Houses of the State legislature, and seek a probe into the incident.
Reacting to the incident, the former Chief of Bureau of The Hindu C.M. Ramachandra, who had accompanied late Hanumanthaiya to the Vidhana Soudha when it was under construction and wrote a book on the monument, termed it an assault on the sanctity attached to the building. “Late Hanumanthaiya had attached so much sanctity to the building by inscribing ‘Government’s work is God’s work’ on the building.”
According to Hanumanthaiya, people were supreme, he said. On the reason behind constructing such a magnificent building, Mr. Ramachandra said, “Vidhana Soudha was to dwarf the Attara Kacheri (High Court building) built by the British, as the then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had angered Indians by ridiculing Mahatma Gandhi during his visit to Birmingham Palace when he had said that he did not like a naked fakir climbing the steps of the palace.”
Mr. Ramachandra said that this serious lapse should engage the immediate attention of Mr. Shettar and Mr. Bopaiah.
