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  Way to India’s heart is through Gandhi

Way to India’s heart is through Gandhi

| SUNANDA K. DATTA-RAY
Published : Mar 16, 2015, 11:52 pm IST
Updated : Mar 16, 2015, 11:52 pm IST

A leading member of Britain’s Liberal Democrat party, which is a member of the ruling coalition, has resigned following a sting operation with a reporter posing as a wealthy British Indian businessman

A leading member of Britain’s Liberal Democrat party, which is a member of the ruling coalition, has resigned following a sting operation with a reporter posing as a wealthy British Indian businessman prepared to make an illegal donation. The incident may not be unconnected with the rationale of Mahatma Gandhi becoming the first Indian, as well as the first person, without an official position to have a statue in London’s Parliament Square.

Gandhi isn’t responsible for the image Indians enjoy of being rich, open-handed and perhaps not very scrupulous. But since it’s well known that Indians revere Gandhi — whispers of those in India who wish to honour his murderer, Nathuram Godse, haven’t yet reached Britain — British politicians who wish to court Indian tycoons also pay homage to Gandhi.

The Parliament Square statue isn’t the first. A bust was installed in Tavistock Square 47 years ago. A BBC reporter who covered the event told me that though Prime Minister Harold Wilson, put in an appearance, he flatly refused to say a word into the mike. My friend’s interpretation was that the programme was being broadcast in India where Labour had no votes.

Times have changed. Now Prime Minister David Cameron dresses his wife up in a sari and both sit through rituals at the Hindu temple in Neasdon, which boasts of being the largest outside India. His two predecessors, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, also thought it politic for their wives to be seen occasionally in Indian attire. It’s all part of political reaching out, and I can’t help the suspicion that Mr Cameron was doing just that when he said that 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 very next day, Britain’s media approvingly quoted the Vatican’s statement that there is no alternative to force in West Asia to stop jihadists committing “genocide” against Christian minorities. At the same time, Queen Elizabeth and the entire royal family accompanied by Mr Cameron,

Mr Brown, Mr Blair and the present Labour leader, Ed Miliband, attended a grand service at St. Paul’s Cathedral to honour the 453 British servicemen killed in Afghanistan. The British are mightily chuffed that unlike Hamid Karzai who feared European troops aggravated the Afghan situation, his successor pays tribute to British soldiers who made the “ultimate sacrifice.”

Master sculptor Philip Jackson’s nine-foot bronze Gandhi, built at a cost of over a million pounds to commemorate a century of the return of the most famous non-resident Indian, might reflect that his message of non-violence hasn’t lasted too long or gone too far.

But finance minister Arun Jaitley’s presence at the Parliament Square unveiling helped to establish the credentials of the Cameron government, which faces elections in early May and is by no means certain of coming back, with Narendra Modi. Another guest, Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson, Gopalkrishna, ensured the occasion enjoyed liberal, secular, bipartisan Indian approval.

These two groups might help Mr Cameron with the investment and skills Britain needs to revive flagging industry and generate employment, something for which he is eternally grateful to Ratan Tata. But the BritIndian worthies who raised the money for the statue and attended the ceremony, are important for political donations and mobilising ethnic Indian voters. Gandhi dead is as much a vote catcher as Gandhi alive ever was.

I had an early experience of this politicisation in 1968 when Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger of what was then West Germany invited three or four of us Indian journalists in London to Bonn for a small and informal Gandhi Jayanti celebration in his chancellery. The Chancellor said he had always been a Gandhi follower and Khubchand, India’s ambassador who had been a member of the war reparations committee with the honorary title of major-general, made a long speech in German that we Indians didn’t understand. Not many Germans did either, I was told, because of his accent. Someone muttered in my ear that Kiesinger’s past during the Hitler years wasn’t above suspicion, and a Gandhi ceremony was part of the rehabilitation process.

There was a grander Gandhi Jayanti in London that year with Lord Mountbatten, a white-haired white-robed Mira Behn in a dramatic duet with Vanessa Redgrave, the Archbishop of Canterbury, India’s high commissioner, Shanti Swarup Dhavan and other celebrities. One of the more interesting speeches I recall was by Gandhi’s former jailor in some Indian prison who spoke of a remedy the Mahatma gave him for his stomach troubles. I don’t think any of the players had axes to grind. The possible exception may have been Lord Mountbatten who held forth, as always, on his own heroic role.

Perhaps that was the purpose. Indian settlers in Britain were neither rich enough nor articulate enough in the Sixties to be of any consequence. Indira Gandhi’s India before the Bangladesh war was not economically vibrant enough or sufficiently politically important to merit special attention. But Lord Mountbatten’s personal mills never stopped grinding, and he had enough pull with the royal family, the Labour government and the establishment in general to organise a show to pay respect to Gandhi, but with himself as the central figure.

Of course, Britain has genuine Gandhi admirers. The laughing mill workers with whom he was photographed in the small Lancashire town of Nelson clearly loved him. So did the East End Quakers with whom he stayed in 1931. In fact, I read somewhere that there was a proposal for a statue there around the time of the Round Table Conference. Like the one in Tavistock Square, that statue wouldn’t have been a statement of political opportunism.

The writer is a senior journalist, columnist and author