![]() ![]() He was a reporter in India in the 1960s, and has been an admirer of India’s valiant journey to become a democratic society after two centuries of colonial rule. His scholarship is without doubt: His account of apartheid-era South Africa, Move your Shadow, published in 1985, is not only a sobering account of the harrowing reality of apartheid it also won him the Pulitzer Prize. He doesn’t bear the burden of being British he is an American. ![]() Lelyveld is uniquely qualified to write about Gandhi. Joseph Lelyveld, former executive editor of The New York Times, wrote Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle with India, a biography of Gandhi. Now contrast that with what happened in India last week. But nobody suggested that Britain needed to pass a law to outlaw dishonouring Churchill. ![]() Many were offended, and there were editorials condemning the vandalism. A few years ago, following demonstrations in London, some anarchists had cut grass and pasted it on the bald pate of Churchill’s statue, giving it a mohawk. It isn’t as if Britain has forgotten Churchill, or that he has fallen into disrepute. Fallible: Gandhi’s life, Lelyveld says, was marked by a ‘tireless striving towards perfection’. ![]()
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