The ongoing saga over the renaming of Fawara Chowk in Shadman after revolutionary freedom fighter Bhagat Singh crossed a hurdle on Wednesday when a panel of experts cleared the pending proposal.
Now it is up to the City District Government to implement the recommendation of the ‘Dilkash Lahore Committee’- tasked with clearing recommendations for renaming select roads and places in the city, The Hindu reported on Thursday.
Renaming the road after Bhagat Singh had been put on hold and referred to the committee late October by the District Coordination Officer (DCO) following objections by some right wing organisations including the Jamat-ud-Dawah to renaming a road of the city after a non-Muslim. The DCO had ordered the renaming of Fawara Chowk (also referred to as Shadman Chowk) after Bhagat Singh on his 105th birth anniversary on September 29.
According to committee member Ahmad Rafay Alam, no one in the committee, which included five clerics, opposed the proposal at the meeting on Wednesday. “No one in the committee has opposed it, as far as I know. There were some people who did not want to commemorate non-Muslims. There were five clerics in the committee including those from Badshahi Mosque and Jamia Naeemi, and no one objected,” he said in various posts on Twitter.
Till Partition, the roundabout had been called Bhagat Singh Chowk in memory of the fact that the revolutionary had been hanged there by the British on March 23, 1931, for his role in the Lahore Conspiracy Case. Viewing Bhagat Singh purely as an Indian freedom fighter, Pakistan renamed the place soon after Independence.
For over a decade now, civil society activists have been demanding that Shadman/Fawara Chowk should revert to its old name; arguing that Singh was as an equal part of Pakistan’s history.
