Owaisi slams ‘Maqbara lag raha hai’ remark over Telangana secretariat

Hyderabad: The All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) president and Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi responded to ‘Maqbara lag raha hai’ remarks on the new Telangana secretariat and said that the Prime Minister ‘could not build something like this’.

Owaisi congratulated state chief minister K Chandrashekar Rao on completing the new secretariat building named after Babasaheb Ambedkar, which was thrown open on Sunday.

Owaisi tweeted and said that the building must remain a symbol of Telangana’s inclusive growth story.

A Twitter user replied to the post saying that the structure looks like a mausoleum and asked whether it was built for a funeral. Slamming the comment, the AIMIM president said that the new secretariat building design was inspired by various temples.

“Design was inspired by temples of Neelakanteshwara Swamy temple in Nizamabad, Rajaprasads of the Wanaparthy Samsthanam, and Hanuman temple in Sarangapur, Gujarat,” said the MP asking the commenter whether he will still say that the building looks like a mausoleum.

Owaisi also said that during the construction of the building, a waqf-registered mosque was illegally demolished and has now been reconstructed. He said that this was the ‘first instance of a reconstruction of a demolished Masjid’.

He said that the building was beautiful but the Prime Minister could not build something like this.

Telangana Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Friday reiterated its claim that the new secretariat resembles a mosque and has failed to resemble the ’emotions of 85 per cent Hindus’ in the state.

In a graphic tweeted out by @BJP4Telangana Twitter handle, the saffron party called the construction a ‘distortion of history’ as it allegedly doesn’t represent the culture of either the Kakatiyas or the Shatavahana rulers.

This is not the first time that the state BJP went after the style of construction of the new Secretariat.

State BJP chief Bandi Sanjay on February 10 issued a threat to demolish domes of the new Secretariat building if his party was voted to power in the next elections. He says the domes of the new Secretariat reflect the culture of Nizam.

Sanjay, who is known for making controversial statements, alleged that CM KCR turned the secretariat into a tomb like the Taj Mahal to please AIMIM president Asaduddin Owaisi.

The state government has also issued a clarification stating that the building has been modelled on the lines of various temples, including the Hanuman temple in Gujarat’s Sarangapur.