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US, Indian citizens decry bid to hail Gandhi as apostle, face verbal
abuse
WSN Network
SAN FRANCISCO:
Irrespective of how much more is now known and understood about the
role of Gandhi during India's struggle for political freedom, and
how he is widely seen as the man who induced communalism into Indian
polity and used the lexicon of Harijan not to make it an inclusive
Indian society but to discard the concerns of the strata the higher
caste always hated, official India insists on terming the man as
'Mahatma'. With the possibilities of encashing the 'Gandhi' name
still considerable, Congress president Sonia Gandhi was on October 2
uttering inanities about the role and greatness thrust upon the old
man whom subaltern history is increasingly discarding from its
starcast of the great and worthy.
To underline
such feelings, a group of American and Indian citizens gathered in
San Francisco today to protest the recent United Nations resolution
honoring Gandhi
and declaring Oct. 2nd an "International Day of Non-Violence."
The protest
rally was sponsored by
Gandhism.net and was organised in front of a Gandhi statue at
the San Francisco Ferry Terminal. Protesters displayed signs and
distributed literature, anticipating a peaceful protest in this
popular tourist location. Immediately upon their arrival, however,
they were approached by several Gandhian Indians.
Shocked to see
fellow Indians with signs bearing slogans such as "UNO + Gandhism =
Racism" and "Gandhi Day Sad Day for Human Rights," these Gandhians
initiated a confrontation.
They hurled
verbal abuse and even death threats at the protesters. Ostensibly,
these were the followers of a man India hails as guru of
non-violence. Referencing the Indian government orchestrated carnage
of November, 1984, one Gandhian shouted at a Sikh present at this
all-minority inclusive event. He said, "We eliminated 5000 of you in
New Delhi! Haven't you learned your lesson? You damn taxi drivers."
Racial and caste insults are something higher caste Indian brahmins
have hurled at fellow Indians for hundreds of years now.
Protesters were
undeterred. One even shouted, "Long live America!" He told the
Gandhians, "This is not India,
where you can kill minorities. This is the United States,
where freedom of speech is protected."
Rally organizer
Pieter Friedrich said Gandhism involves a commitment to cloaking a
dedication to violence in pacifist terms. As an example, he
mentioned Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's recent invocation of
Gandhi to defend the U.S.-Indo nuclear deal, where PM Singh insisted
that men such as the creator of India's first nuclear bomb were
inspired by Gandhi. "Gandhi is physically dead," Friedrich said,
"but his racist ideology lives on within the Indian government."
Literature
distributed at the protest contained direct quotes from Gandhi's
writings. One quote was from a 1947 prayer meeting, where Gandhi
said, "If we had the atom bomb, we would have used it against the
British." Another was from his time in South Africa, where he said,
"Ours is one continual struggle against a degradation sought to be
inflicted upon us by the Europeans, who desire to degrade us to the
level of the raw Kaffir whose occupation is hunting, and whose sole
ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with
and, then, pass his life in indolence and nakedness."
Indian minority
protesters said the Indian government never misses an opportunity to
use Gandhi's image to portray India as a secular and equitable
state. The more India
promotes Gandhi, they said, the more aggressively Indian minorities
will react against Gandhism.
Martin Luther
King, Jr. said, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice
everywhere." The protesters in San Francisco appealed to this quote,
saying that injustices in India
which are cloaked by Gandhism must be exposed. They say the best way
to do this is to strike at the
root by exposing Gandhi's racism and sham nonviolence.
3 October, 2007
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