Guptas tarnish Madiba-Gandhi legacy
JOBURG -– A call has been made for decisive action against the Guptas.
The executive director of the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation, Neeshan Balton, has called for decisive action to be taken against the Gupta family whose unconventional business dealings have tarnished the Madiba-Gandhi legacy.
Bolton was speaking at a joint celebration of Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th birthday anniversary and the birth centenary of former South African President Nelson Mandela organised by the Consulate General of India at Constitution Hill.
The programme included cultural performances and the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Seminar on ‘shared ideals and common challenges in India and South Africa on the historical legacy of Gandhi and Mandela’ held at the premises of the former women’s jail.
Addressing the seminar, Bolton said so much harmony had been achieved in this country between Africans and their fellowmen of Indian origin but a single family had come to this country and destroyed all that.
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“They [Guptas] have tarnished the image and legacy of the two icons of the South African-Indian struggles of democracy and self-rule,” said Bolton.
“I call upon the authorities here to take decisive action to deal with the issues around the Gupta family and their unconventional business dealings which have left a lot of misery and discomfort in this country.”
Bolton also defended the existence of the Gandhi statue in Gandhi Square and Constitution Hill and called on the people to rise and challenge the call for its fall by communities around the world and locally the EFF.
His call was echoed by a member of the South African Communist Party and former prisoner Raymond Suttner, who said besides the racial undertones of Gandhi’s reference to African people, he had endeavoured to change what Suttner said was an ‘uninformed’ stance that Gandhi had taken in his formative years of politics.
During his stay in South Africa, Gandhi routinely expressed ‘disdain for Africans’, according to S. Anand, founder of Navayana, the publisher of the book titled, The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire.
According to the book, one of the first battles Gandhi fought after coming to South Africa was over the separate entrances for whites and blacks at the Durban Post Office. Gandhi objected that Indians were ‘classed with the natives of South Africa’, who he called the ‘k…..s’, and demanded a separate entrance for Indians.
“We felt the indignity too much and… petitioned the authorities to do away with the invidious distinction, and they have now provided three separate entrances for natives, Asiatics and Europeans,” Gandhi is quoted as having said in some of his writings to British colonialists.
Protesting the decision of Johannesburg municipal authorities to allow Africans to live alongside Indians, Gandhi wrote in 1904 that the council ‘must withdraw the k…..s from the location. About this mixing of the k…..s with the Indians, I must confess I feel most strongly. I think it is very unfair to the Indian population and it is an undue tax on even the proverbial patience of my countrymen’.
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ANC member and former chief whip in the Johannesburg city council, Premanathan ‘Prema’ Naidoo also defended Gandhi’s derogatory references to African people, which had led to the Ghanaian government’s removal of the Gandhi statue in that country and described him as a racist that hated Africans.
“Gandhi was castigated in India by the right wing and he’s suffering the same fate here from the left wing,” said Naidoo.
“He was approximately 23 years [old] when he arrived in South Africa and people should judge him on what I will call his political awakening during the Bhambatha Rebellion. I want to believe it was the naivety of his youth from which all of us can be forgiven.” d.
The Consul General of India in Johannesburg Dr KJ Srinivasa announced the holding of another instalment of the Gandhi Walk on 7 April next year and the establishment of the Mandela-Gandhi Institute to train South African youth in various skills to prepare them for active participation in the country’s economy.
