prasad1
Active member
When Mahatma Gandhi came to London in 1931, he stayed in the poverty-stricken East End of the city, then visited struggling cotton mill workers in Lancashire.
Now he is to be honoured with a statue in London's Parliament Square, looking out over the Palace of Westminster in the company of such establishment figures as Benjamin Disraeli and his old opponent Sir Winston Churchill. When the statue was announced, the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, said Gandhi's "approach of non-violence will resonate forever as a positive legacy, not just for the UK and India, but the world over".
The statue is designed to pay tribute to a man who lived humbly, loved humanity and practised non-violent struggle against a powerful adversary: the British Empire.
Many of those who gave money for it see him as an example to future generations. Hindu hardliners in India are increasingly vocal in criticising Gandhi”
But there is some irony in the fact that even as Gandhi is being so warmly embraced by the British establishment that once mocked him, his legacy in India is more ambivalent.
Hindu hardliners in India, emboldened perhaps by the sweeping national election victory last year of the pro-Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, are increasingly vocal in criticising Gandhi.
They accuse him of having betrayed Hindus by being too pro-Muslim, and even for the division of India and the bloodshed that marked partition.
That, of course, was the belief of Nathuram Godse, the man who assassinated Gandhi in January 1948. Godse's reputation too is being revised.
This year, the anniversary of Gandhi's murder was marked by attempts by right-wing Hindus to build a temple to honour Godse, a man they now describe as a hero for ridding the nation of Gandhi.
In the 1930s, Churchill described Gandhi as "a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East".
The statue will stand in Parliament Square
But in present-day Britain, Gandhi is largely revered by a generation that is embarrassed about its colonial history and eulogises non-violent methods of effecting change. In India, there are certainly contemporary politicians who take inspiration from Gandhi. Arvind Kejriwal, for example, the anti-corruption campaigner and new chief minister of Delhi, whose party recently won a landslide victory in the capital.
It is true, too, that decades of Indian schoolchildren have learned to call Gandhi "the Father of the Nation".
BBC News - Is Gandhi still a hero to Indians?
Leaders of civil rites movement including Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr. credit Mahatma Gandhi as an inspiration to their own struggle.
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