India commemorated the 60th anniversary of Mohandas Gandhi's assassination yesterday with his great granddaughter scattering the peace icon's ashes in the sea off the country's most bustling metropolis.
Gandhi, who led the nonviolent struggle for independence from Britain, is still revered as the moral conscience of the nation and pictures of his wizened, smiling face are everywhere in India, from the country's rupee notes to murals along the highway.
To honor the nonviolence leader, Gandhi's followers carried his ashes through the streets of Mumbai to the coast of the Arabian sea. Some 300 people, including school and college students and elderly followers, watched as Gandhi's family members took the ashes nearly 1.5km into the sea on a decorated motorboat.
PHOTO: AP
There his great granddaughter Neelam Parikh, a frail 75-year-old immersed the ashes into the sea.
"It's an emotional day for us and also a day for deep thought. A day that we should remember him and remind ourselves of his teachings," she said later.
Gandhi's ashes were preserved by an Indian businessman who sent them to a museum in Mumbai last year. The museum had planned to display the ashes, but Gandhi's family said he would have preferred them scattered at sea.
A prayer ceremony also was planned at the New Delhi meeting house where he was killed by a Hindu extremist in 1948, just months after the nation was born. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi, the head of India's ruling Congress party, are expected to attend. Sonia Gandhi is the widow of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister and Mohandas Gandhi's close friend.
The family of Gandhi's eldest son, Harilal Gandhi, who was estranged from his father, will scatter the ashes as a gesture of reconciliation. Harilal Gandhi had a troubled history with his father and did not attend his funeral, breaking with Hindu tradition under which the eldest son should light the father's funeral pyre.
Harilal's family will have the opportunity to do something they have never done before, said Usha Gokani, a granddaughter of Gandhi.
"It's the correct thing to do, since Gandhi's three younger sons' families have participated in earlier funeral rituals," she said.
Hindus cremate their dead and the ashes are supposed to be scattered in rivers or the sea after 13 days. But after he was killed, Gandhi's ashes were sent to villages and towns across India for memorial services by his followers. It's not known how many urns containing his ashes still exist.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees