By IANS,
Mumbai : Nearly 2,500 students from 57 colleges and activists Wednesday took out a mock funeral here to mark the day Hiroshima city in Japan became the first ever target of an atomic bomb 63 years ago, killing hundreds of thousands.
The “funeral” procession, with four students carrying a model of the atom bomb, started from Azad Maidan and concluded a kilometre away at Hutatma Chowk (Martyrs’ Square), in the heart of south Mumbai’s central business district to mark Hiroshima Day.
The participants carried placards and banners bearing slogans like “No More Hiroshima,” and “We Want Bread, Education and Jobs – Not Bombs.”
Later, the gathering was administered a solemn pledge to strive for a peaceful and nuclear-free world by P.N. Pabrekar of the National Social Service Cell of Maharashtra government and Arun Salunke, NSS co-ordinator for University of Mumbai.
The “funeral procession” was the culmination of several anti-bomb awareness programmes in educational institutions around Mumbai, including poster exhibitions and screening of a film on the attack, “A Mother’s Prayer”.
The attack on Hiroshima city Aug 6, 1945 was followed by another bombing in Nagasaki city Aug 9. The two attacks left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead and many more injured for life and effectively brought to end the second world war.