New Delhi, Sept. 7 -- For almost six years, driving down Bengaluru's Sankey Road elicited a smile. Rising dramatically from the ground, a gigantic pointed stone standing behind iron gates opposite the Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium inevitably brought to mind the menhirs of Obelix from the Belgian comic series Asterix. At the end of July, on Kargil Vijay Diwas, it was officially inaugurated as a tribute to fallen martyrs-six years after it was installed and 16 years after the project began, even as the other component of the memorial remains in limbo.

Called veeragallu (Kannada for hero stone), the obelisk draws from a Kannadiga tradition that goes back to the fifth century of erecting a carved memorial to commemorate the heroic death of a ...