Gandhi being insulted in this prickly world

Among the many functions of the media, one that strikes me as being significant is its ability to give publicity to those who least deserve it. The media, thanks to its innately competitive character, tends to highlight the bizarre and the weird. Increasingly, outlandishness is becoming a foolproof way of guaranteeing publicity.

Last Thursday’s edition of The Times (London)— thanks to the online editions you no longer have to wait for the deliveries of the hard copy—contained a characteristically bizarre news item. It seems that there is a proposal to instal a statue of Mahatma Gandhi outside the Manchester Cathedral to both commemorate the Mahatma’s 150th birth anniversary and the horrible terrorist incident that led to the deaths of 22 concert goers in 2017. Gandhi was sought to be commemorated as the apostle of non-violence.

There may understandably be differences over the choice of the Mahatma as the most appropriate personification of peace and goodwill outside a Christian church. Some may have felt that something more abstract would fit the sensibilities of the 21st century. These debates can be never ending and differences of opinion are bound to persist.

In any case, the relevant people decided in their wisdom that in the multi-ethnic surroundings of Manchester, a statue of Gandhi would fit the bill. Consequently, and without too much fuss, the decision was taken to install his statue and a donor was found to underwrite the costs.

Unfortunately, the story does not end here. A bunch of publicity seekers in the Manchester University Student’s Union have initiated a “Gandhi must fall” campaign to prevent the Mahatma from having a prominent presence in the city. Taking their cue from the “Rhodes must fall” campaign that was waged in Oxford University to remove all traces of the adventurer and colonist who bequeathed a part of his massive fortune to his alma mater, the student activists decided that now was the turn of Gandhi. The problem with Mahatma it would seem was his inability to include black Africans in his battle for civil rights in South Africa. Additionally, Gandhi had apparently made some disparaging comments about South African blacks.

The tendency to judge history in terms of the standards of the present is very tempting. It avoids the more difficult business of trying to locate the past within an earlier context. Everything can be readily packaged in a contemporary garb on the assumption that the present constitutes the highest stage of human achievement. This is of course an unhistorical approach but it is also patently ridiculous. It is about as pathetically absurd as approaching a literary text of the past without any reference to the context in which it was written.

Tragically, this seems to have become a fashion in some campuses and among some academics. This was the logic behind the removal of a Gandhi statue from the University of Ghana a year ago. Now the same thing is being attempted in Manchester.

Hopefully nothing more will come of this and having secured their five minutes of fame in the media the impetuous students will move to their next obsession. That may well happen but it is also time that the rest of society starts taking note of the rising level of absurdities that are defining public life all over the world.

The point to note is that there is a mad rush to detect behaviour that somehow or the other has caused offence. Prickliness has become the norm so that almost everything is being treated as offensive to someone or other. People have even begun determining their own gender status. For example, if a man decides he is actually a woman but someone describes him as a man, that is considered evidence of offensive behaviour. In some Western countries, even the police force is being sensitised to take into account such individual quirkiness on the ground that a man who chooses a self-image of being a woman may be scarred for life and suffer trauma in case he is referred to as ‘he’ rather than ‘she.’

Frankly, all this is getting rather tiresome. While everyone recognises the importance of stopping gratuitous insults on individuals, it is becoming more and more difficult keeping pace with everything that is potentially offensive. Last week, a writer in a Kolkata daily berated Prime Minister Narendra Modi for Good Samaritan act of removing litter from a beach in Chennai. This obsession with tidiness, we were informed, was a characteristic of Adolf Hitler. The implication was clear: Swachch Bharat was a fascist act. I guess sooner or later we will also be told that vegetarianism is inherently fascist because Hitler shunned meat.

The question is: how should we react if some people in Manchester become so frightened of causing offence that they withdraw the offer to install a statue of the Mahatma outside Manchester Cathedral? It is the sovereign right of the civic authorities in that English city to either have the statue or not have it. However, I don’t think we in India should let it rest it at that. We should make it very clear that any second thoughts on the statue would be construed as an act of insult to India. India did not ask for that statue to be installed. But once it was decided to install it, any U-turn counts as a gratuitous insult to a man we revere. It should also be made clear that we will view any disrespect to Gandhi as an unfriendly act against India.

It is time to stop this great onslaught of rubbish. The writer is a senior journalist and Member of Parliament, being a presidential nominee to the Rajya Sabha.