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| Saturday, 18 September 2004 |
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Indian President Kalam retraces Gandhi's steps in South Africa PIETERMARITZBURG, South Africa, Friday (AFP) Indian President Abdul Kalam Thursday visited the railway station where Mahatma Gandhi was once thrown from a whites-only train compartment, an incident which launched a political career that ended with India's freedom. Kalam, the first Indian president to pay a state visit to South Africa, boarded a train shortly before it pulled into the university city of Pietermaritzburg, some 70 kilometres (50 miles) inland from the east coast port of Durban. On arrival, he paid homage to India's most famous son. "As I travelled on that train I remembered how this lawyer came to Kwazulu-Natal (province) to defend someone, to defend the rights of a people," Kalam said. At the station he read a plague dedicated to the incident in 1893, when the young Gandhi was thrown from a train when he refused to move from a first-class compartment after white passengers complained. "KwaZulu-Natal has a place of pride in our history, because it was the place were Indians were first brought and its also the place from where the joint struggle against discrimination started," said Kalam. Gandhi spent 20 years in South Africa as a young lawyer, fighting the injustices of a racist colonial system. In 1894 he founded the Natal Indian Congress to agitate for Indian rights. Two years later he began to teach a policy of passive resistance to and non-cooperation with the South African authorities. In 1914 the South African government made important concessions to Gandhi's demands, including the recognition of Indian marriages and the abolition of the poll tax for them. His work in South Africa complete, he returned to India and led the former jewel in the British colonial crown to freedom in 1947. Kalam met former South African president Nelson Mandela earlier Thursday and also addressed the opening of the Pan African Parliament. Born into a poor Moslem family in southern India but rising to become one of the country's top scientists, Kalam is an avid lover of children and at his request he will visit a black school in Umlazi, a sprawling township outside Durban, on Friday. |
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