Gandhi nuh rate we

THE EDITOR, Madam:

In You Can’t Blame the Youth, Peter Tosh indicted a schoolroom that taught Jamaican children to call pirates and conquistadors great men. I thought of him on reading ‘Celebrating peace, tolerance, and the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi’ ( The Sunday Gleaner, October 4). The byline reads ‘Guest Columnist’. Only the footnote reveals that its author, Mayank Joshi, is India’s high commissioner to Jamaica. This was diplomacy, not commentary.

Mr Joshi calls Gandhi “a global beacon of peace and non-violence”. He does not mention the 21 years Gandhi spent in South Africa, or what he wrote there about Africans.

Jailed in 1908, Gandhi wrote in his own newspaper, Indian Opinion, that “Kaffirs as a rule are uncivilised — the convicts even more so. They are troublesome, very dirty and live almost like animals.” The next year, he resolved on “an agitation to ensure that Indian prisoners are not lodged with Kaffirs or others”. In 1906, when the Zulu rose against a colonial poll tax, he led an Indian stretcher-bearer corps in support of the colonial forces that killed thousands of them.

Ghana has read this record. In 2018, after its professors petitioned, the University of Ghana removed the Gandhi statue that India’s then president had unveiled two years earlier. Jamaica, Mr Joshi reminds us, has three Gandhi memorials. Our national newspaper has now printed his tribute without a line of context.

Every hero is flawed, and I do not ask for perfection. I ask why a man who insisted that Indians be kept apart from Africans should be offered as a “beacon” to a nation of their descendants, and why the High Commission chose our newspaper to do it. The column quotes Prime Minister Modi and promotes his programmes. Soft power works best where it meets no resistance.

Compare Peter Tosh, arrested in the 1960s for protesting white minority rule in Rhodesia. Jamaica awarded him the Order of Merit in 2012, 25 years after his murder. A Jamaican who stood against white rule in Africa waited a quarter-century in his grave for that honour. An Indian who asked to be kept apart from Africans already has three memorials here.

An honourable life needs no embellishment. And, when our children grow up admiring the wrong men, we will not be able to blame the youth.

KEISHA McDONALD

Attorney-at-law

St Ann