The
question that follows.
Mahatma Gandhi went to South Africa in 1893.
One day, he had to travel by train to Pretoria. He
bought a ticket for the first class compartment and
occupied his place there. Soon, the ticket collector
came to check his ficket. When he saw Gandhiji
there, he ordered him to move to the third class
compartment, as coolies were not permitted in the
first class compartment, Gandhiji protested. After all.
he had bought a first class ticket and was entitled to
be seated there. Nevertheless, the ticket collector
pulled him out of the compartment, and pushed him
onto Pietermaritzburg railway station and threw his
luggage out. The young man spent the whole night
in the waiting room in the
cold.
• Do you think
Gandhiji was a
victim of racial
discrimination
Give reasons.
Answers
Answer:
Mahatma Gandhi has been variously described as an anti-colonial protester, a religious thinker, a pragmatist, a radical who used non-violence effectively to fight for causes, a canny politician and a whimsical Hindu patriarch.
But was India's greatest leader also a racist?
The authors of a controversial new book on Gandhi's life and work in South Africa certainly believe so. South African academics Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed spent seven years exploring the complex story of a man who lived in their country for more than two decades - 1893 to 1914 - and campaigned for the rights of Indian people there.
In The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire, Desai and Vahed write that during his stay in Africa, Gandhi kept the Indian struggle "separate from that of Africans and coloureds even though the latter were also denied political rights on the basis of colour and could also lay claim to being British subjects".
They write that Gandhi's political strategies - fighting to repeal unjust laws or freedom of movement or trade - carved out an exclusivist Indian identity "that relied on him taking up 'Indian' issues in ways that cut Indians off from Africans, while his attitudes paralleled those of whites in the early years". Gandhi, the authors write, was indifferent to the plight of the indentured, and believed that state power should remain in white hands, and called black Africans Kaffirs, a derogatory term, for a larger part of his stay in the country.
Racial segregation
In 1893, Gandhi wrote to the Natal parliament saying that a "general belief seems to prevail in the Colony that the Indians are a little better, if at all, than savages or the Natives of Africa".
In 1904, he wrote to a health officer in Johannesburg that the council "must withdraw Kaffirs" from an unsanitary slum called the "Coolie Location" where a large number of Africans lived alongside Indians. "About the mixing of the Kaffirs with the Indians, I must confess I feel most strongly."
The same year he wrote that unlike the African, the Indian had no "war-dances, nor does he drink Kaffir beer". When Durban was hit by a plague in 1905, Gandhi wrote that the problem would persist as long as Indians and Africans were being "herded together indiscriminately at the hospital".
This, in itself, say historians, is not entirely new and revelatory. Also, some South Africans have always accused the man who led India to independence of working with the British colonial government to promote racial segregation. In April, a man was arrested in connection with vandalising a statue of Gandhi. A hashtag #Ghandimustfall (sic) has gained circulation on social media.