NEW DELHI: Mahatma Gandhi, who led efforts to end British rule in India and was repeatedly imprisoned, is to be honoured with a statue outside Britain’s parliament that will stand alongside tributes to several colonial-era enemies.
British finance minister George Osborne, on a trip to New Delhi to meet the new government of Narendra Modi, wrote on Twitter that Britain would “honour his memory” with a statue in Parliament Square.
India’s independence hero will rub shoulders with his one-time nemesis, British wartime prime minister Winston Churchill, who once said he hoped Gandhi would die from fasting and famously derided him as a “half-naked fakir”. The Gandhi statue will also stand alongside one of Jan Smuts, a leader of South Africa in the early 20th century who favoured racial segregation.
Gandhi was jailed by Smuts’s government for campaigning for the rights of downtrodden Indians, a forerunner to his more famous non-violent campaign at home that would strike fear into successive British governments until independence in 1947. “I hope this new memorial will be a lasting and fitting tribute to his memory in Britain, and a permanent monument to our friendship with India,” Osborne said. AFP
