By Meral Jamal and Tim Kitz

Carleton students are set to debate whether the school should remove the Gandhi statue in front of Richcraft Hall. Hosted by the Institute of African Studies Students Association (IASSA) in collaboration with the Carleton University Debate and Speech club (CUDS) and the Ontario Public Interest Research Group (OPIRG), the public debate will take place on Jan. 31 in the atrium between the Unicentre and Tory Building.

The event comes three months after the university’s campus newspaper, the Charlatan, published a letter by the IASSA president Kenneth Aliu on why he feels the statue should be removed.

By Meral Jamal
By Meral Jamal

Aliu wrote in his letter, “Remove the Gandhi Statue from Richcraft Hall,” that while Gandhi is remembered as a freedom fighter that brought an end to British colonialism in India, he was also a racist who “utilized anti-Black racism as a weapon to bargain with the British about the subjugation of Indians living in South Africa.” He supported his statements by referring to instances mentioned in the book The South African Gandhi by Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed. This included using racial slurs against Black Africans and Gandhi’s insistence on having Indians in South Africa categorized higher on the apartheid hierarchy than Black Africans.

Aliu’s letter also shed light on Gandhi’s sexism, claiming that he was a “sexual predator and misogynist who viewed women’s sexuality with contempt and disgust.” While Aliu did not elaborate his argument, he did mention that Gandhi “slept with underage girls—including his niece—to ‘test’ his own sexual imperturbability.”

Exactly ten days after the Charlatan published Aliu’s letter, the newspaper published another one by Sheldon Paul. Paul is a second-year Public Affairs and Policy Management student and the current vice-president of the Malayalee Student Association of Carleton. His letter took a different stance on the issue – “Replace the Gandhi Statue with a Better Figure.

Paul emphasized in his letter that it was not just important to remove the Gandhi statue but to choose the right historical figure to replace it.

While Paul did not disagree with Aliu’s statements about Gandhi’s racism and misogyny, he moved on to write that, “At a time where South Asians are more divided than ever and actively continue to buy into colonial colourist and racist narratives and meekly accept Britain’s economic exploitation and political fragmentation of the Subcontinent, an Indian activist’s statue is crucial to remind the community of its political necessity beyond just disempowerment and ‘model minority’ status.”

In his letter, Paul suggested that the statue of another prominent Indian freedom fighter, Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh, should replace the one of Gandhi. He feels that Bhagat Singh’s actions and convictions are more representative of South Asia’s fight for freedom from colonialism.

In an interview with the Leveller, Paul also highlighted shortcomings of the debate so far. He is critical of seeing Gandhi as a singular representation of all Indians and of seeing all Indians as somehow embodying the ideals of Gandhi. Paul explained that the “Western media has a way of showing that only Gandhi serves as a symbol of who we are as people.”

The South Asian subcontinent was only partitioned into its current states in 1971 following the independence of Bangladesh and the region remains one of the most culturally, linguistically and ethnically diverse regions in the world. “Gandhi being used as a symbol [for all South Asians] reduces us to a very simplistic portrayal,” Paul stated.

When discussing the Gandhi statue, Paul believes it is relevant to bring up cases of African racism against South Asians, like the expulsion of South Asians from Uganda in 1972 under the leadership of Idi Amin. For him, while Gandhi was one Indian racist towards Africans, there are a lot of African nations that have historically been racist towards Indians.

“For me, the process of taking down the Gandhi statue is not one of saying that all Indians have done something wrong,” Paul told the Leveller. “For me, this is a process of mutual reconciliation and I very much have issues with this being a single-sided idea that Indians have always had this superior view toward African people because this is historically not a fact.”

Meanwhile, though people have been positive toward the event itself, Aliu told the Leveller that “there were criticisms levied that my article was an attack on the South Asian community, which is why I felt that a debate on the topic might be able to further clarify.”

For Carleton alum Ajay Parasram, a History and International Development professor at Dalhousie University specializing in South Asian history, some of these arguments miss the point. “Why isn’t the focus of the debate about forging Afro-Indian solidarity against colonialism?” he asked the Leveller.

Given the amount of interest that students on campus have and continue to show, “I think students long for that space to discuss pivotal issues surrounding the Gandhi statue as it is not just about Gandhi alone,” Aliu said. “The event propels us to think about the politics of memorialization, whiteness, anti-blackness, colonialism.”

Parasram thinks it is important to keep these debates historically-grounded. “Gandhi is a strawman for people with every possible axe to grind, love him or hate him,” he told the Leveller. “Very few people historicize him as a living human being with evolving ideas and instead brandish him as a static and anti-intellectual scarecrow instead of a person who actually went through a process of decolonization in which he had to unlearn everything that he learned.”

If nothing else, this will be the beginning of a conversation surrounding historical figures and history itself and how the two affect the present and the future. “My hopes are that we continue to interrogate the history of the figures we have deified,” Aliu stated. “It’s an opportunity to reassess the single-story narrative that has been told about them and one that has been engrained deeply in our collective memory.”

This article first appeared in the Leveller Vol. 10, No. 4 (Jan/Feb 2018).