Jack Straw: Gandhi’s statue deserves place next to Mandela and Churchill

Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian independence leader, was a “half-naked fakir”, according to Winston Churchill.

A statue of Mandela was unveiled in Parliament Square in 2007.

That is now to be joined by one of Gandhi — not far from the magisterial statue of his nemesis, Churchill.

It’s fitting that both Mandela and Gandhi should be there.

What both exceptional men were able to show was that more mountains could be moved by moral example than ever by force of arms.

Both were connected by geography too, as we are to Gandhi, in particular.

It was when Gandhi was in Mandela’s home country, South Africa, that he became radicalised by the injustice and overt racism of this British colony.

Back in the biggest colony of all, the British Raj, Gandhi put what he had learnt into practice by espousing non-violent resistance to British rule.

This included his boycott of British-made textiles.

Churchill’s insult against Gandhi’s chosen form of dress was made when Gandhi was in the UK in 1931 for a second “Round Table Conference” on India’s future.

It got nowhere. But while he was here Gandhi accepted an invitation from a Darwen millowner, Mr Corder Catchpool of Greenfield Mill, to see for himself the effect of his boycott on local textile workers, many of whom had been plunged into poverty because of it.

At this time, 80% of all the Blackburn and Darwen area’s cotton production went to India or China.

The UK had, for decades, effectively rigged the market against home-produced Indian cotton goods but that was hardly the fault of the Lancashire workers.

It is a tribute to their character and stoicism that, it was said, they received Gandhi with “sympathy and affection”.

Gandhi’s purpose, of an India undivided by religion or caste, was sadly never realised.

But his life, like Mandela’s, and indeed Churchill’s, is testament to what human kind can achieve.

It is right that all three will now be celebrated in Parliament Square.