Statue Of Mahatma Gandhi Has Been Vandalized In The Dutch Capital

Image Credit- India Today

The statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Amsterdam on the Churchilllaan has been covered with pains of red and on the pedestal, it has been chalked racist and has an abbreviation for a particular expletive that is written against the police according to reports by the Dutch newspaper, Metro.

In the Dutch capital, Mahatma Gandhi’s statue has been vandalized with graffiti by unknown miscreants who used spray paints that took place amidst the wave of attacks on figures who are controversial following the protests across the globe after the custodial killing of George Floyd who is an African-American.

As per reports from the alderman, Rutger Groot Wassink, who said that a declaration will be filed by the municipality for the daubing that took place. It has been stated by the city officials that any kind of daubing of these things and vandalism of any form is opposed by them and unacceptable. Wassink stated that the cleaning of the image will be done and it is quite logical that a declaration is going to be filed.

It is completely unknown about who are the persons involved in the daubing. An employee who belonged to Kunstwacht who has been providing repairs and maintenance stated that it could take hours to get the cleaning work done. On Wednesday, the daubs can be seen by a 75-year-old man who called the municipality.

According to that man, who has been living here for forty never experienced something like this. The statue was there for years now and it has not been affected a bit. After the death of Floyd, the 46-year-old man from Minneapolis on 25th May, in the United States and the worldwide protests on Black Lives Matter that took place subsequently all across the world, a lot of debates came upfront regarding statues of people and street names that have a colonial past.

All across the globe, statues have been defaced and brought down of controversial historical figures. In various places, buildings and images have been defaced recently that refer back to Netherland’s colonial past that includes Piet Hein’s statue in Rotterdam and also Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam.

All these expressions are anti-racist and followed after George Floyd’s death in the hands of a white police officer according to reports by Metro. Gandhi was famous as a champion of non-violence and human rights. But when he was in his twenties, a lot of time was spent by him in South Africa, and he found the white people to be the race that is dominants and the black people were living like beasts, very dirty and troublesome.

According to reports, those ideas were renounced by him later. On 2nd October 1990, the statue has been unveiled on the Churchillian in honor of the 121st birthday of Gandhi.

Sculptor Karel Gomes has made the design who passed away in 2016. The plan for the statue that time came from Triveda which is a Hindu organization. In the statue, Gandhi has been depicted as featuring numerous robes around his body as he was walking with slippers on the feet having a stick on one hand and a book on the other.

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