Is It Revisionism To State That Gandhi Was a Racist and Paedophile?

Just asking…

Image via Wikimedia commons

The spirit of revisionism pervades our public discourse in a way that it hasn’t for a very long time.

And some will feel that it is a welcome phenomenon and others will think that it isn’t.

Winston Churchill, who was voted as the greatest Briton of all time in 2002, would not get a look in these days, given the degree to which his crimes have been dug-up for modern audiences.

The Bengali famine in which millions of people starved to death in the 1940s makes grim reading and so does his liberal use of the N-word to describe Black folk.

The same individual was also scathing of Gandhi, when the latter began to make serious headway in the battle for Indian independence from Britain, describing him as a half-naked fakir, striding up the Viceroy’s palace, bargaining on equal terms with representative of the King-Emperor.

But Gandhi, for all of his profession of high ideals of Satyagraha, wasn’t much different from the those he was fighting against.

Seriously?

It was during his time in South Africa, that our protagonist was said to have described the native population as savages, who were inferior to Indians.