NAGAPATTINAM: After a decade of construction, work on a Rs 3-crore memorial for victims of a massacre in Keezhvenmani is ready. The building would be inaugurated ahead of the 51st Venmani Martyrs Day on December 25.
“Construction and painting would be completed in a few days. In the next phase, we are planning to create a recreational park that would take six months. The memorial would house a coaching centre for students and aspirants training for competitive exams,” said CITU district secretary S Mani.
The old memorial was built over the hut Ramaiyan, in which 44 Dalit labourers were allegedly burnt alive by henchmen of a landlord named Gopalakrishna Naidu on the night of December 25, 1968.
The new memorial was opened in the semi-finished state in March 2014.
Work on the new memorial took time to complete due to a shortage of funds. It is surrounded in its outer circumference by sculptures of 44 raised arms in memory of the 44 people who died in the Keezhvenmani massacre 51 years ago.
The memorial covers an area of around 3,000 sq. ft. The ground floor would serve as a meeting hall, the first floor would be used as a meditation hall and the second floor would have a sculpture of a banana flower, similar to the one in the old memorial.
The flower indicates a philosophy of ‘the resistance of people would raise similar to the banana tree, which rises from the roots of another tree’.
Celebrations of the anniversary is expected to be a low-key event because the model code of conduct for local body elections is in force.