Shirdi Sai Idol Removed In Shahpur Jat Temple; Videos Give The Lie To Plea It Had Got Damaged

New Delhi: In the last week of March, a Shiv Mandir in Shahpur Jat, an urban village in south Delhi, witnessed an unusual change. A Shirdi Sai idol was replaced by a second one of Lord Ganesha, allegedly by a group of people claiming to be members of the temple’s management committee, who said they had consulted the residents.

- Shradha.Chettri

This claim, however, was vehemently denied by the locals, who said they only got to know about the removal of the statue through videos shared on WhatsApp.

The temple, popularly called “Purana Shiv Mandir”, is located inside a narrow lane with a UCO Bank branch as the landmark. The wooden doors open to a Shivling, with the right side having the idols of Ganesha, Durga, Radhe-Krishna, among others, locked in a glass enclosure. On the left are idols of Hanuman, Ram, Sita, Laxman and Laxmi-Vishnu.

The Shirdi Sai idol, the only one without a glass enclosure, was placed in the centre, but now it has been replaced with another one of Ganesha. The words “Sab ka Malik Ek” have been overwritten with “Om Ganeshaya Namah”.

The video circulated among the locals showed several elderly men standing inside the temple asking workers to remove the Sai idol. One of them, later identified as Padam Panwar, was heard saying, “We are removing the Sai Baba idol as he is not a god. He died in 1918 and was a Muslim. We should install statues of those who died in the 1900s, like Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Chandrashekhar and Rajguru.”