Shortly after former IPS officer Amitabh Kumar Das returned his police medal to protest the partial demolition of the Khuda Bakhsh Oriental public library, the Bihar Viplavi Parishad (BVP) on April 15, 2021 circulated a poster on social media, urging people to save the historical national library. The library was opened by Khan Bahadur Khuda Bakhsh on October 29, 1891.

BVP members began a “Har Shaks: Khuda Bakhsh” campaign to oppose the demolition of the Curzon reading room and front garden of the library. According to the Bihar State Bridge Construction Corporation, the move will help overcome traffic issues from Kargil Chowk to NIT flyover.

In response, the BVP wrote a message to the people in their poster in Hindi. “Let us save this precious heritage from the mafia bulldozer,” it said along with a picture of the structure in the middle.

Apart from the BVP, others like the Indian National Trust for Art and Culture Heritage (INTACH) appealed to Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar to stay the call for destroying the front portion of the building. A partial demolition is likely to result in a space crunch and hinder security to the VVIPs visiting the library, said the library’s former director while talking to The Print.

Earlier, on April 11, the State Vidhan Sabha’s library committee had called a meeting with Patna’s civil society to consider public opinion about the decision. Since then, people like Das have been vehemently condemning the proposal.

Above all, the Khuda Bakhsh library is a regal structure recognised to have “national importance” by the Government of India in 1989. The public library boasts of lakhs of books and manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Pashto, and Turkish along with a twelfth century book on human and animal surgery, obtained from a library in Spain.

When it was first opened, the library started with 4,000 manuscripts. Nowadays, it is known for its rare collection of Persian and Arabic manuscripts. Over the years, many lords and ladies, personalities like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam have visited the library.

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