Gandhi was no Nelson Mandela who loved everyone

TWO brave men have dared to dig up some dirt on India’s iconic leader Mahatma Gandhi. But it wasn’t some smear campaign to discredit a revered leader but to tell the truth.

The letters by Puni Dyer (“Gandhi not icon he was portrayed to be”, Mercury, April 15] and Dr Duncan du Bois (“Interpreting Gandhi’s South African legacy”, Mercury, April 16] would have raised many an eyebrow among the Indian community. I expected a rush of letters, asking, ‘how dare these two men belittle a world -renowned leader?’

When I criticised the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi some readers were offended and asked me to leave him alone. It’s been a way of life among Indians, not to find fault with a family member even if he had committed a heinous crime. They like to hush things up.

Without doubt, Gandhi was a great leader, deified in India. But was he a flawless leader as he is made out to be?

As both Dyer and du Bois have pointed out, Gandhi wasn’t in South Africa so much to fight against white oppression of the Blacks and the indentured labourers but for the welfare of the merchant class who followed the girmitiyas to South Africa.

Coming from the exclusive banya class which never mixed with another class, it is not far-fetched to say that Gandhi was not passionate about the plight of the indentured labourers.

The banyas lived in town, trading and making money while the indentured workers lived in Magazine Barracks. The two never mixed.

While his name is synonymous with Indian independence and he gave the world satyagraha, the passive resistant movement, I never, on a personal level, heard of Gandhi being spoken of proudly in the Indian community. I didn’t ever remember seeing a picture of the father of the nation hanging on the wall.

What I do remember is Gandhi being thrown off the train in Pietermaritzburg.

However, did he ever go to the sugar estates and mingle with the sweaty, blackened sugar cane cutters, fighting for their cause? The poor knew he did not care for them.

Perhaps Gandhi’s greatest sin was that he despised Africans. To put it bluntly, Gandhi was a racist, as Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed claim in their book, ‘The Gandhi of South Africa: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire’ that Gandhi kept the Indian struggle ‘separate from that of Africans and Coloureds’ even though both also suffered under white oppression.

Another damning indictment against the Mahatma: Even though he objected to Indians being called coolies, he himself didn’t mind calling Africans the K word.

What a derogatory term by a great soul. Well, well, he wasn’t a Nelson Mandela who loved everyone, even his oppressors! THYAGARAJ MARKANDAN | Kloof