By IANS,
Chandigarh : A memorial to Beant Singh, Punjab chief minister who was assassinated here in 1985, was finally inaugurated Wednesday after an inordinate delay in its completion.
The memorial and the Chandigarh Centre for Performing and Visual Arts were inaugurated Wednesday by Gen. (Retd.) S.F. Rodrigues, administrator of Chandigarh who also interacted with Jaswant Kaur, wife of the late leader, on the occasion.
“There is an immediate need to make the Beant Singh memorial a functional and vibrant project and to highlight the ideals and the cause for which he laid down his life,” Rodrigues told mediapersons.
“This project must be developed further in an integrated and harmonious manner and we need more public participation for realizing our true objectives and the concept visualized before raising this memorial,” he said.
Beant Singh was assassinated on Aug 31, 1995, by a suicide bomber. The memorial project was announced a few months later.
The Chandigarh administration and the Punjab government contributed funds for the construction of the memorial but the project kept on getting delayed.
The memorial includes a library building, an open-air auditorium, a lecture hall, a conference hall, a committee room, a reading room and water fountains and houses the Centre for Performing and Visual Arts.
“Plans are on to beautify this place and many more features will be added in the next phase to attract more tourists here,” said a spokesperson of the Chandigarh administration.