Intellectual Bankruptcy of some Indian Academics abroad
Leicester Mercury
18 Jun 2020
image: GETTYLEGACY: A reader is not the only one opposed to the removal of Gandhi’s statue in Leicester. This was taken on Saturday
A CONCERTED international effort has been made to defame and downgrade Gandhi for quite a few years now.
It seems individuals and organisations involved in this campaign dislike very much the fact that Gandhi very proudly proclaimed his Hindu faith and culture.
From wearing the traditional dhoti to singing Hindu hymns and having complete faith in the Hindu holy book the Bhagvad Gita, Gandhi was proud of his Hindu heritage.
The anti-Gandhi lobby wants to defame Gandhi so it can achieve its real target of belittling the world’s oldest and most vibrant faith.
These people have an extreme dislike for the Hindu faith. The last Gandhi statue taken down was at a Ghana University.
The vast majority of Ghanaians had no problem with the statue. However, the hate lobby persuaded a few academics at the university that Gandhi was racist.
All it then took was to organise a petition based on half truths and in no time thousands of people signed up. The hate lobby achieved its objective.
It is in South Africa that Gandhi started a struggle against injustice and his experiences there were of immense importance in his strategy to confront the British Raj in India.
Gandhi’s nascent movement for justice in South Africa inspired and galvanized a whole generation of South African freedom fighters like Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and many others.
After Gandhi departed for India, he left his son Manilal in South Africa to continue the struggle.
Manilal was present at a crucial meeting of the ANC in 1949, where he pressed the party to unconditionally adopt non-violence, but with little success.
The attitude of the party toward the Gandhian ideal of non-violence was in subsequent years best summarised by Desmond Tutu.
He said: “Gandhi was to greatly influence Martin Luther King Jr, the leading light in the American Civil Rights Movement, as well as the South African National Congress of Nelson Mandela.
“So many, many people expected our country to go up in flames, enveloped by a catastrophe, a racial bloodbath. It never happened.
“It never happened because in the struggle against an evil of injustice, ultimately it did not take recourse to violence, and because you and so many others in the international community supported the struggle.”
Nelson Mandela wrote a wonderful article for the January 3, 2000 issue of Time magazine.
Mandela wrote about one of his teachers: Gandhi. His story was called The Sacred Warrior and shows some of the ways Gandhi influenced him.
It is a matter of great pride for Indians that Mahatma Gandhi has had such a enormous impact on so many people all over the world.
Mahatma Gandhi was able to articulate the glorious heritage of India which had been stifled by invading armies for around a thousand years. Newly independent India also played an active role in bringing freedom to other colonised countries.
Those who are today asking for Gandhi’s statues to be removed for his alleged racism please first study the subject in depth.
Nitin Mehta, Leicester