Mohandas Gandhi was once very unpopular with the British Establishment and was imprisoned on many occasions under colonial rule for his protests and campaigns for an independent India. No longer, though. Gandhi already has pride of place in Tavistock Square with a statue installed in 1968 and, earlier this year, it was announced is also due to have a statue placed in Parliament Square sometime next year. This week, it was announced that Westminster City Council has granted planning permission for the statue to go ahead.William Hague (then UK Foreign Secretary), announcing the statue on a visit to Delhi back in July said, ‘Gandhi’s view of communal peace and resistance to division, his desire to drive India forward, and his commitment to non-violence left a legacy that is as relevant today as it was during his life. He remains a towering inspiration and a source of strength.”[1] George Osbourne (UK Chancellor of the Exchequer), on the same visit also joined in, ‘As the father of the largest democracy in the world, it’s time for Gandhi to take his place in front of the mother of parliaments. He is a figure of inspiration, not just in Britain and India, but around the world.”[2]
Cynics might question the timing of the announcement back in July, uncomfortably juxtaposed with confirmation of a UK £250m arms deal with India only the day before. It seems the UK government is willing to go to great lengths to woo the power of the Indian rupee and access to the burgeoning Indian consumer market.
Lord Desai (Indian origin economist) plans, apparently, to go on hunger strike to raise awareness of the £1 million needed to build this new Gandhi statue[3]. It has so far raised £100,000.
As I take a walk around Parliament Square, I am reminded of Brian Haw’s long-term protest camp here from 2001 until his death in 2011. On one side stands the new UK Supreme Court – a place I have entered once just to lodge papers for a hearing, as a lowly trainee solicitor.
I am struck by the tourists who flock there, to take photos of our Houses of Parliament. I look around the other statues and wonder how Gandhi will get on with the other incumbents here. Winston Churchill, of course, was an adversary of Gandhi, having once said of Gandhi’s campaign of peaceful resistance that he "ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back." He later went on to say, "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion."[4] Despite this, however, Britain was happy to recruit thousands of Indian soldiers in both world wars to fight on behalf of the Empire (see our blog at here). Indian women also took an active role as nurses, drivers, mechanics and other operational roles, as well as millions of others in India providing indirect support.[5]
But why Gandhi? Undoubtedly he was one of the most prominent leaders of the Indian Independence Movement, the ‘Father of India’. But, with one statue of Gandhi already in London’s Tavistock Square, why not mark that other great statesman of Indian Independence – Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar? Ambedkar, born an Untouchable went on to receive degrees in economics, politics and law and, like Gandhi, was called to the Bar in London. He served as India’s first law minister and drafted the Indian Constitution. But Ambedkar is also remembered for rejecting Hinduism and the caste system in India, instead embracing Buddhism along with thousands of other Dalits (‘untouchables’) in 1956, only to die six weeks later. As far as I can tell, there is only one statue of Ambedkar in London – at the LSE, where he once studied, though not in public view. Perhaps Gandhi – in embracing, rather than rejecting Hinduism – is a safer bet to appeal to the current Hindu Nationalism of Modi [though here a more ironic connection might be that Nathuram Godse, Gandhi’s assassin was once a member of the Hindu Nationalist organisation the RSS, with which Modi also has close links and for which he was once a full time worker].
But, in Parliament Square, there is one glaring omission among the statues of the great and the good. There is not one woman. So, where are all the celebrated women throughout history? Perhaps, in India, like the wives of Gandhi and Ambedkar (and millions of other women), they were married off at a young age, to spend their life in domestic servitude – without the freedom, means or the backing to go off themselves and pursue degrees abroad or train as barristers.
There are certainly outstanding women in India, though, who managed to pursue education. For example, Cornelia Sorabji was the first woman to read law at Oxford University and to practise law in the UK and India (see our blog about a play of her life at http://www.indiainlondon.com/cornelia-calling/). Also Lotika Sarkar – lawyer and campaigner for women’s rights - was the first Indian woman to graduate from Cambridge University and later also the first woman to receive a PhD in law from Cambridge. Or perhaps, more controversially, Indira Gandhi, the first female Prime Minister of India.
But my vote might go for a statue commemorating the heroism of ordinary women everywhere, but particularly in India. Women who are given no choice about their lives, married at a young age and then a lifetime spent raising children, cooking, cleaning and facilitating the comforts of their husband’s and other’s lives and participation in the wider world. Perhaps a statue to the every day heroism of millions of women such as these would also be a fitting tribute.
[1] The Independent (UK) 8 July 2014
[2] Ibid.
[3] The Economic Times, 6 November 2014
[4] The Independent (UK) 28 October 2010
[5] See http://www.cwgc.org/foreverindia/context/indian-army-in-2nd-world-war.php
