Why Gandhi was not a racist and why we need to protect his statue

By Dr Raj Persaud

Consultant Psychiatrist

ON JUNE 7, the statue of Edward Colston, a slave trader, was torn down during an anti-racism protest in Bristol following the death of a black man, George Floyd, in the US, in police custody.

Statues of other prominent historic men then became targets, including Win­ston Churchill’s figure in London’s Parlia­ment Square, on which was daubed slo­gans, including ‘was a racist’.

Ramachandra Guha, a historian and economist, does point out in a recent ar­ticle for The Atlantic, entitled, ‘Churchill, the Greatest Briton, Hated Gandhi, the Greatest Indian’, that Churchill confided to a senior Cabinet colleague, that Indi­ans were… “a beastly people with a beast­ly religion”. Churchill described Mahatma Gandhi as: “…a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace.”

Many Indians are aware of Churchill’s position in this regard, yet, thanks to the philosophy underpinning the way Gan­dhi helped India liberate itself, they don’t deface Churchill’s statue. Gandhi encour­aged a more nuanced view of hostilities, that took account of the human being in­side even his most implacable enemies.

Yet, that same Sunday (7) afternoon on Parliament Square, protesters then draped placards with anti-racism mes­sages across Gandhi’s statue, and simi­larly wrote ‘racist’ near its plinth.

Also, in Washington DC, in early June, prior to the London incident, and appar­ently as part of the same George Floyd ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests, the statue of the Mahatma outside the Indian Embassy was attacked, and is now covered, pend­ing repair.

The idea of pulling down Gandhi’s stat­ue went mainstream with the publication of a letter in The Daily Telegraph on June 9. A reader, Mr Thomson, wrote that, as the statue of Churchill had the words – “was a racist” – spray-painted on it, why was the nearby statue of Gandhi not also similarly defaced? This reader asserted: Gandhi wrote racist comments about black Africans when he was in South Af­rica. The university of Ghana removed his statue in 2018 because of this. Should we not take his statue down immediately?

But the claim that Gandhi was a racist remains controversial, most recently promulgated by a book published in 2016, The South African Gandhi: Stretch­er-bearer of Empire, by Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed; the key thesis appears to be that Gandhi separated the fight for justice for Indians – while he was in South Africa – from the African struggle there.

Other recent books, such as Faisal Devji’s The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptations of Violence (2011) and Joseph Lelyveld’s book, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his struggle with India (2011), threaten to topple Gandhi’s standing in the world.

Author Pankaj Mishra, in a review of Lelyveld’s book in The New Yorker said: “Lelyveld shatters the attractive myth . . . of the brave little man in a loincloth bringing down a mighty empire.”

The provocative subtitle of Desai and Vahed’s book – Stretcher-bearer for Em­pire – refers to Gandhi’s ambulance work during the Anglo-Boer War and the noto­rious Bhambatha Rebellion, named after a Zulu resistance leader, who encouraged a significant number of Zulus to refuse to pay a British levied tax; a foreshadowing of some of Gandhi’s own tactics against British rule of India in decades to come.

An allegation is Gandhi raised a unit of ambulance workers among the South Af­rican Indians to help the British in a war with Zulus fighting for their independ­ence. These ambulance missions, it is al­leged, symbolised Gandhi’s fundamental loyalty to the Empire.

Thousands of Zulus died, or were im­prisoned, or flogged in a campaign that Gandhi, it is contended, did little to di­rectly oppose.

However, other reports suggest Gan­dhi’s ambulance work at the time also in­volved rendering aid to wounded Zulus. Other historical accounts also allege that Zulus were themselves recruited into the fighting force against their own brethren.

The idea that Gandhi abandoned Afri­can’s struggle to pursue merely Indian ones is contradicted by the fact Gandhi later met the leadership of the African- American civil rights movement, and he inspired Martin Luther King.

As reported by Anil Nauriya, the author of a book entitled The African Element In Gandhi, in a speech at the Johannesburg YMCA on May 18, 1908, Gandhi had said: “If we look into the future, is it not a herit­age we have to leave to posterity, that all the different races commingle and pro­duce a civilisation that perhaps the world has not yet seen?”

Nuriya, a lawyer and author, argues that if the young Gandhi shared any prej­udices towards Africans, he outgrew these by around 1908, six years before he left Africa. Therefore, the contemporary ac­cusations that Gandhi was racist neither reflect the totality of his life, nor are a fair representation of a more complex story.

Nelson Mandela writing in Time Mag­azine (The Sacred Warrior, Dec. 31, 1999) said of Gandhi that he is the arche­typal anticolonial revolutionary. His strategy of non-cooperation, his asser­tion we can be dominated only if we co­operate with our dominators, and his non-violent resistance inspired anti-co­lonial and anti-racist movements inter­nationally in our century… The Gandhi­an influence dominated freedom strug­gles on the African continent right up to the 1960s because of the power it gener­ated and the unity it forged among the apparently powerless...”

Given the current fashion for invoking ‘unconscious bias’, it was perhaps inevi­table that Gandhi would become a target of the mob; they may be disturbed at a pre-conscious level by Gandhi’s rejection of their violence and his advocacy of con­structive engagement with the enemy, as well as dogged presentation of rigorous argument, as opposed to reflexive negat­ing any position other than your own.

As Mandela points out in the above quote, Gandhi also believed that any gen­uinely effective liberation struggle (as opposed to empty posturing) must start with tough self-examination. This is not fashionable at the moment.

At the time of writing, the statue of Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the scouts’ movement, is being protected by ordinary residents of Poole, plus other members of the Scouts movement have travelled many miles to stand by the stat­ue to protect it. This is because threats have been made to topple this represen­tation of a man now accused of homo­phobia, fascism and racism.

If Gandhi’s statues continue to come under threat, then Indians, and all devo­tees of peaceful, radical, imaginative, non-violent protest for change, must gather at such places, to protect him.