AMRITSAR: Jallianwala Bagh Shaheed Parivar Samiti (JBSPS) has asked the government to open the renovated Jallianwala Bagh to common public by August 20 or these famlies of the martyrs will do it on August 25.
The group objected to the building of a new Jallianwala Bagh Centenary Memorial (JBCM) while the original still existed. JBSPS president Mahesh Behal told TOI on Thursday: “The national memoraial is shut for 16 months.” This is where during the colonial times, British brigadier-general Reginald Edward Harry Dyer massacred unarmed protesters on April13,1919.
Behal said: “Earlier, the national memorial was closed for renovation and then because of Covid-19. But now every other place, including the schools, is open. Even the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has issuing directions for reopening of all the central-protected monuments that were closed due to Covid-19. The memorial should have opened from June 16.” In April, Jallianwala Bagh National Memorial Trust general secretary S K Mukharjee had said the memorial will open on April 13 but the second wave of Covid-19 came. Confronted, Shwait Malik of the Jallianwala Bagh National Memorial Trust said the reopening was close. Behal alleged that the government was trying to destroy the originality of a place where hundreds of people had laid down their lives during the freedom struggle.
He said called for compiling a list of all the martyrs from both India and Pakistan. Pakistan’s Bhagat Singh Memorial Foundation chairman Imtiaz Rashid Qureshi had also claimed to have started this effort.
