Gandhi gets London statue near Churchill
London, March 14
A historic bronze statue of Mahatma Gandhi was unveiled today at Parliament Square here in a rare honour bestowed by the government in Britain whose colonial regime he had overthrown by his non-violent campaign.
Gandhi’s nine-foot statue was unveiled jointly by British Prime Minister David Cameron and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley as chants of “Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram”, a popular bhajan that was the Father of the Nation’s favourite, reverberated in the air. Political leaders, Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan and Gandhi’s grandson Gopalkrishna Gandhi were present at the ceremony.
Gandhi is the first Indian and the only person never to have been in a public office to be honoured with a statue at the Square. The statue stands opposite Britain’s Houses of Parliament in the Palace of Westminster and adjacent to iconic leaders like Nelson Mandela.
Gandhi’s statue also has Britain’s war-time Prime Minister Winston Churchill for company, an irony given the ex-premier’s dismissive thoughts of someone he described as a “half naked fakir”. The statue depicts the leader of the Indian national movement wrapped in a shawl to shield himself from the London cold during his last visit to the British capital in 1931. — PTI
