MINISTER HAILS DECISION

Shailesh Vara, an Indian-origin British Minister for Justice, has welcomed the UK government’s decision to install a statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Parliament Square . British Foreign Minister William Hague and Chancellor of Exchequer George Osborne announced the plan for the statue of Gandhi, the inspiration for non-violent civil rights movements around the world.

Mahatma Gandhi, who led efforts to end British rule in India and was repeatedly imprisoned, is to be honoured with a statue outside Britain’s parliament that will stand alongside tributes to several colonial-era enemies. British finance minister George Osborne, on a trip to India, wrote on Twitter  that Britain would honour Gandhi’s memory with a statue in Parliament Square. “As the father of the largest democracy in the world, it’s time for Gandhi to take his place in front of the mother of Parliaments,” Osborne said during a visit to the Gandhi Memorial in Delhi. Gandhi will rub shoulders with his one-time nemesis, British wartime PM Winston Churchill, who once said he hoped Gandhi would die from fasting and famously derided him as a “half-naked fakir”.

Churchill was reportedly disturbed by Gandhi’s “striding half naked” into the British viceroy’s palace in 1931 “to parlay on equal terms with the representative of the Emperor-King” while simultaneously conducting a resistance campaign. The statue would join others of famous statesmen, including Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Mandela.

But it will also share space with one of Jan Smuts, a leader of South Africa in the early 20th century who favoured racial segregation. Gandhi was jailed by Smuts’s government for campaigning for the rights of downtrodden Indians. Britain hopes the new statue will be up by summer of 2015, in time for the 100th anniversary of Gandhi’s return to India from South Africa.