New Delhi: The Amar Jawan Jyoti at the India Gate was merged with the eternal flame at the National War Memorial (NWM) here on Friday.
In a short ceremony, a part of the Amar Jawan Jyoti flame was taken and merged with the flame at the NWM, which is 400 metres away on the other side of India Gate. Chief of Integrated Defence Staff Air Marshal B R Krishna presided over the ceremony. The Amar Jawan Jyoti was constructed as a memorial for Indian soldiers who were killed in action in the 1971 Indo-Pak war, which India won, leading to the creation of Bangladesh.
It was inaugurated by the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi, on January 26, 1972.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had on February 25, 2019, inaugurated the NWM, where names of 25,942 soldiers have been inscribed in golden letters on granite tablets.
Ex-servicemen express mixed reactions
Ex-servicemen expressed mixed reactions on the Centre’s decision to extinguish and merge the Amar Jawan Jyoti. Former Air Vice Marshal Manmohan Bahadur tagged Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Twitter and requested him to rescind the decision.
“Sir, the eternal flame at India Gate is part of India’s psyche. You, I and our generation grew up saluting our brave jawans there,” he stated.
While National War Memorial is great, the memories of Amar Jawan Jyoti are indelible, Bahadur noted.
However, Former Lieutenant General Satish Dua expressed “great satisfaction” on merging the Amar Jawan Jyoti with the NWM’s eternal flame.
“As someone who had steered the design selection and construction of the NWM, I had been of this view all along that India Gate is a memorial to the fallen heroes of First World War,” Dua stated.
The Amar Jawan Jyoti was added in 1972 as we did not have another memorial, he mentioned.
The NWM pays homage to the soldiers who were killed in action after the country’s independence and all homage ceremonies have been shifted to the new memorial already, he noted.
—PTI

Press Trust of India