External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj undertook a train journey on Thursday from Pentrich to Pietermaritzburg, a railway station in South Africa where a young Mahatma Gandhi was thrown out of a “Whites-only” compartment 125 years ago.
Ms. Swaraj, who is in South Africa on a five-day visit, also inaugurated a two-sided bust of Gandhiji, called the “Birth of Satyagraha.”
The bust “will act as a constant reminder to all of mankind of the momentous moral journey that young Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi undertook,” Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted. “125th anniversary of the Pietermaritzburg incident, 100th Birth Centenary of Madiba [Nelson Mandela] and 25 years of the diplomatic relations. It couldn’t get bigger.”
“To practice this belief of ‘Vasudeva kudumbakam’ [the world is one family] we need to keep reminding ourselves that Truth and Non-violence is the way,” said Ms. Swaraj in her address at the event.
On the night of June 7, 1893, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, then a young lawyer, was thrown off the train’s first class compartment at Pietermaritzburg station after he refused to give up his seat as ordered by racially prejudiced officials. The incident led him to develop his Satyagraha principles of peaceful resistance and mobilise people in South Africa and in India against the discriminatory rules of the British.
Ms. Sawaraj, along with Deputy Foreign Minister of South Africa Luwellyn Landers, released postal stamps on Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya and Oliver Tambo to mark 25 years of the establishment of diplomatic relations. Tambo was a South African anti-apartheid politician who served as President of the African National Congress from 1967 to 1991. Upadhyaya was a thinker and co-founder of Bharatiya Jana Sangh.