Dr. Amitabh critiques India’s insufficient comprehension of Gandhi’s influence on South Africa, urging for a more comprehensive understanding of its relationship with South Africa, exclusively for Different Truths.

July 19, 2014, a date which I believe should have been remembered and commemorated in South Africa, if not in India. This date takes us back a full hundred years when Gandhi left South Africa for India. He ignited a revolution among Indians living in South Africa, demanding their rights to live with human dignity in a non-violent acquisition.

Millions of Blacks and Coloureds who form the majority of South Africa had never heard the lone voice then, nor do they now. I don’t blame them. Repression was after all worst towards them; South Africa to this date represents the Blacks and Coloureds that form the majority of this country’s population.  Indians living in Natal, Transvaal, and other areas, although brought in as indentured labourers lived a better life in a repressive society than the Blacks.

Indians in India till 1991, the common man on the street, the school-going child, and even the country’s elite intelligentsia never discussed South Africa’s killing fields, although we knew more about the genocide in Bangladesh, the Pakistani aggression, and the 1962 war with China. India did veto at the United Nations against apartheid South Africa, but that was more on the behest of the former Soviet Union.

Apartheid in South Africa

I reached South Africa in 1992 when apartheid was still in place, and like any other non-Whites, I needed a pass to come to the White areas from the Bantustan Republic of Transkei, where I served as an Orthopaedic surgeon for the Blacks. I came to South Africa from Zimbabwe on a one-way ticket to Transkei, was isolated at the Johannesburg airport, and bundled on to a flight to Transkei. The Gwalior sun had burnt my skin to a much darker proportion than the average Blacks of South Africa.

I brought with me from Gwalior a bundle of hopes and this great burden of Gandhi, which happens to be part of our growing up, indispensable to all Indians whether one likes it or not. Gandhi as an icon is celebrated more with birthdays, naming of streets and roads, naming of institutions, and every word he spoke or wrote is researched to expand in-depth meanings. It’s this fashion that contemporary India celebrates, and Gandhi is further embedded in every expatriate Indian reaching foreign shores.

It would be utterly insulting if I proclaimed to finally rid myself of the baggage of Gandhian policies and thoughts. As a Gwalior boy who played around with thoughts, words, and colours, being perpetually in love with some or other girl, the relevance of Gandhi in political subversion for a hallucinatory peace in India and overseas seemed far-fetched.

A Misfit

The Gandhian philosophy, which is far-encompassing and iconoclastic, does seem in many ways to shape our belief, like any other Indian living in India. Anand Sharma of Congress (I) had told me in no uncertain terms then that I would be a misfit considering my Bengali background and Gwalior, to which I claim to belong.

Sometimes around 1982, Saeed Naqvi was the first Indian journalist who exposed the farce of South Africa. I remember reading his article in the Times of India, where he mentioned in detail about atrocities by the White apartheid government, the high life behind high walls and barbed wire of White supremacist homes, and the poorest of poor blacks who lived longing for just another day. Gandhi probably had then never heard of the Black Bantustans of South Africa.

Today, every Indian dignitary is taken to the Petermaritzburg station, where Gandhi was forcibly ejected from the train. Their thoughts on Gandhi are entwined with sipping of the best South African wines and an evening of frivolous gayety. I continue to wonder how Saeed Naqvi could enter South Africa during those tiring times. But even that article didn’t make any Indian sit up and think, least of all the intellectual elite who prided over endless cups of coffee in fusing Gandhi with Trotsky.

The Face of White South Africa

Professor Christian Barnard is a pioneer heart transplant surgeon, but few know that he was the face of White South Africa in the international arena, where he tried his best in decriminalising apartheid, joining medicine at the same time. In his book, South Africa: Sharp Dissection, published by Tafelberg in 1977. He writes, “There are thousands of Indians in South Africa who have shown that despite their lack of full political rights, they have the job and business opportunities to make a success of life and earn a more than comfortable place in the South African sun. As I explained earlier, they themselves decided that they are better off in South Africa than in India. Considerations such as these, however, seem to have no place in the politics of hypocrisy as practiced by Third World leaders such as Mrs. Gandhi. There is also the indisputable fact that the social, economic, and political climate in India is far more utopian.”

I had the pleasure of meeting Professor Christian Barnard after the democracy in Colombo, where he was chairing an international congress, and I, as a non-White, representing South Africa there. He embraced me. I was quite keen on his beautiful secretary rather than discussing medicine or politics with him.

Gandhi is best remembered to Indians in Natal and to the rest of South Africans who cared to peep into the history of struggle against apartheid by his granddaughter, Ela Gandhi. An activist and a former Member of Parliament, she continues spreading Gandhi’s ideals through the Mahatma Gandhi Development Trust and the Mahatma Gandhi Salt March Committee. She wrote the foreword to a Protest Poetry book edited by me. Let me quote a few lines from there, which summarises present-day South Africa:

Reading the poems, one begins to ask questions: 17 years down the road of democracy, what is it that is uppermost in our minds? Where are we heading to? Will there ever be satisfaction for all in a country so diverse, so economically unequal, and so rapidly growing?

In my editorial of this book, Unbreaking the Rainbow: Voices of Protest from New South Africa, I mentioned:

What lies within these pages is difficult to fathom; desperation invents sheer acuity in countering untruths; the conscious nerve screams to be told. As humans devoid of borders, each of us is related to the silence that joins us, its heady aroma reminding us that suffering is not crystalline in velvet-lined boxes; it remains as innumerable tiny pieces pricking our conscience at all odd moments.

Gopalkrishna Gandhi’s Contribution

I believe that this article would stay incomplete without mentioning the contribution of Gopalkrishna Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, for South Africa during his tenure as the High Commissioner of India post-democracy during and after 1996. I had the pleasure of being with him as an old Africa hand. I especially remember an incident during a press conference when a White media-interviewer asked, ‘Mr. Gandhi, now what do you think South Africa has to learn from India and what message would you give to our newly elected politicians?’ Pat came the answer: South Africa must now learn to look after its millions of citizens, irrespective of colour and creed; it must look after legal and illegal migrants who have escaped war and complex humanitarian emergencies. It must look after all with equal responsibility’.

He remains the only diplomat from India till today who toured extensively the whole country, went to various Black and Coloured townships, and interacted with the poorest of the poor, reaching out to them with open arms devoid of any security or protocol.

Feature picture design Anumita Roy

Illustration by the author

Dr Amitabh Mitra

Amitabh Mitra is a poet, artist, and medical doctor based in East London, South Africa. He is the Head of the Trauma and Emergency Medicine Department of a tertiary hospital complex in the black township of Mdantsane. It is the second-biggest Black township after Soweto. Recently, the Department of Arts and Culture, in association with Oxfam, honoured him for his contribution and long-standing devotion to the people of Mdantsane.

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