Gandhi letter up for auction, India writes to UK

With hardly a week to go for the auction of a letter written by Mahatma Gandhi, the Government has stepped in with efforts to acquire it.

With hardly a week to go for the auction of a letter written by Mahatma Gandhi, the Government has stepped in with efforts to acquire it. Auctioneer Christie’s, meanwhile, has decided to go ahead with the sale. The rare letter written by Gandhi 19 days before his assassination for his paper Harijan on January 11, 1948, had pleaded for tolerance towards Muslims.

The British High Commission said on Wednesday that the Indian Government was yet to approach it for acquiring the letter. “They haven’t spoken to us or me. This issue is going to the public and the open society. It is quite hard for the Government, but people realise the sensitivity,” British High Commissioner Sir Michael Arthur told a news channel. He admitted it would be difficult for India to acquire the letter in the open market. “It is difficult for the Government to get deeply involved… They recognise the sensitivity. Let us see how we take it forward.”

Eminent Gandhians and those belonging to the Mahatma’s family have asked the Government to acquire

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the letter, which is to be auctioned by Christie’s on July 3 in London.

The letter will be among the handwritten treasures from a private collection to be auctioned by Christie’s. The collection includes 570 lots of handwritten manuscripts by many notable figures of European history from the 13th to 20 century, including Elizabeth I, Napoleon, Winston Churchill, Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. After the Gandhians Basant Kumar Birla and Satya Paul wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the PMO asked the Ministry of Culture to take steps to acquire the letter.

The Ministry of External Affairs was brought into the picture and sources said the Indian High Commission was being asked to negotiate the acquisition of the letter. A spokesperson for Christie’s, which had sometime back estimated that the letter would fetch 9,000 to 12,000 pounds, today said Gandhiji’s letter is part of the auction items on July 3 and “anybody can bid for it”.

“The letter is of public importance and anybody can bid for it,” he said, but refused to give an estimate of its likely bid.

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In his letter to the Prime Minister, Paul said he was informed about the auction of Gandhi’s letter by a friend in the UK and has suggested that the Government could consider entering the fray as a bidder if other efforts failed.

“May I request your good self to get that letter by negotiation or through auction. You may instruct the Indian High Commissioner in England or the Ministry of Culture or the National Gandhi Museum to enter into bidding if the negotiation to get the letter fail,” he said.

Sources said the MEA should be able to guide the Culture Ministry about how to acquire the letter as it involves funds to buy the letter. “The 1998 experience was successful. May be we will repeat it. But it depends on the MEA,” they said. In a similar instance in 1998, 18 letters written by Gandhi on Hindu-Muslim unity and non-violence were auctioned by Sotheby’s in London and these were purchased for the country by some NRIs.

Gandhiji’s letter to be auctioned is part of a collection titled The Albin Schram Collection of Autograph Letters, a personal and private collection assembled over a period of 30 years by Albin Schram, a Switzerland-based collector.

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“The Government policy has been to acquire the original letters of Mahatma Gandhi. It has been done in the past. There is nothing wrong in acquiring this letter,” Rajmohan Gandhi, grandson of Gandhi said.

“The Government is trying its best to acquire this letter. This letter is crucial to the country,” eminent Gandian Nirmala Deshpande said.