A statue of Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi was unveiled on Saturday (March 14) in London’s Parliament Square, a place packed mostly with monuments to men who served the British Empire that Gandhi helped destroy.
“Nations transcend bitterness and acrimony. In Parliament Square, there is also a statue of Sir Winston Churchill, arguably the man who opposed Gandhi most resolutely. Some would detect an irony in the great prime minister sharing a public space with the man he once described as a half-naked fakir,” said Indian Finance Minister Arun Jaitley who was in London on a two-day visit.
Churchill famously called Gandhi “a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal palace.”
But almost seven decades after India won independence from Britain in 1947, thanks in a large part to Gandhi’s peaceful civil disobedience campaign, relations between the two countries are strong, with both ke