Gandhi must not fall

Student politics these days is frequently self-parodying. The Gandhi Must Fall campaign at Manchester university is a perfect case study.

Manchester city council has approved plans for a nine-foot statue of Mahatma Gandhi outside Manchester Cathedral. The idea is to promote peace in the wake of the horrific Manchester Arena attack. Who could possibly object to this?

Sara Khan, Manchester students’ union’s ‘liberation and access officer’, that’s who. She is leading the campaign against the statue on the grounds that the Indian independence leader made racist comments about Africans.

This follows the Rhodes Must Fall campaign at Oxford, which unsuccessfully tried to have a statue of the long-dead colonialist Cecil Rhodes removed from Oriel College.

That movement actually began at the university of Cape Town, which successfully had a statue of Rhodes removed. Similarly, Gandhi Must Fall started in west Africa, where a Gandhi statue was removed from the university of Ghana.