Mahatma Gandhi was a British agent, one of India’s most senior judges has claimed, provoking protest before a statue of the Indian independence leader is unveiled in Parliament Square in London.
Justice Markandey Katju said that Gandhi had a hidden agenda and accused him of deliberately trying to drive a wedge between Hindus and Muslims and helping to cement Britain’s authority over both groups.
The row over Gandhi’s legacy comes as Philip Hammond, the foreign secretary, flies to Delhi for his first official visit. He is to meet Arun Jaitley, India’s finance minister, who is scheduled to lay a wreath and unveil a new statue of Gandhi in London on Saturday.
Narendra Modi, the prime minister, will not meet Mr Hammond, as he has begun a five-day trip to the Seychelles, Mauritius and Sri Lanka.
“I submit that Gandhi was objectively a British agent who did great harm to India,” Mr Katju, the 68-year-old former chairman of the Press Council of India, wrote on his personal blog yesterday.
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“By constantly injecting religion into politics continuously for several decades, Gandhi furthered the British policy of divide and rule.”
Mr Katju claimed that Gandhi, a Hindu, repeatedly peppered his speeches with Hindu religious phrases and ideas, which gradually encouraged Indian Muslims to press for the creation of their own state, Pakistan, which was founded through the partition of India by Britain in 1947, less than a year before Gandhi’s assassination by a Hindu extremist.
Mr Katju, whose grandfather was deeply immersed in India’s freedom struggle, is viewed as a maverick with a record of making provocative remarks. In the past, he has claimed that “90 per cent of Indians are idiots” because they vote in elections purely according to their religion and social caste, rather than on the merits of a specific candidate.
The remarks about Gandhi provoked strident criticism. “I think this man is half mad,” said Inder Malhotra, a veteran writer and biographer of Gandhi. “He is well educated but he says things that are idiotic. I am distressed that a man who served on the Supreme Court should say such things.”
“If Katju didn’t exist we might have had to invent him for the humour,” tweeted Harini Calamur, a prominent film-maker.