Lithuania on Friday Oct 02,2015 unveiled a statue dedicated to global peace icon Mahatma
Gandhi and his great friend Hermann Kallenbach, marking the 164th
birthday of the Indian independence leader.
The bronze statue shows Gandhi standing
by architect Hermann Kallenbach, who was born to Jewish parents in what
today is Lithuania, in a testament to a decades-long friendship which
began in Apartheid-era South Africa more than a century ago.
Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevicius
hailed the “friendship between two people, between two nations” as he
unveiled the 1.8-metre statue in the western town of Rusne.
Both Gandhi and Kallenbach, a German
citizen, arrived in South Africa as immigrants in their thirties. Gandhi
developed a deep friendship with the wealthy Kallenbach after they met
in 1903.
The architect donated land and financial
resources to help Gandhi set up Tolstoy Farm, the community that became
the headquarters of his non-violence movement — a radical move in
racially-segregated South Africa.
Attending Friday’s ceremony, Tushar
Gandhi, the leader’s great-grandson, drew parallels between the Indian
and Baltic independence movements, both rooted in non-violent struggle.
Whereas Gandhi inspired massive civil
disobedience in India to shake off British colonialism in 1947, the
so-called “Singing Revolutions” helped Lithuania and fellow Baltic
states Latvia and Estonia break free from the crumbling Soviet Union a
quarter-century ago.
“We share the heritage of having won our
independence from very strong, powerful coloniser. And we’ve both done
it in almost identical manner — using mass protests which were
non-violent,” Tushar Gandhi told
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