Other questions are being raised by the Indian communities in Britain, which are divided over how they see Gandhi. The Sikh Federation, UK, a grubby organisation with a history of making outrageous statements and garnering attention, has in a letter to culture secretary Sajid Javid called Gandhi “a blatant racist, a sexual weirdo, or worse, a child abuser, and someone discriminating on the basis of the Hindu caste system, which is now outlawed in the UK”. The federation has also appealed to Philip Jackson, the sculptor approached by the British government to begin work on the Gandhi statue, to abandon the project. Lending a touch of farce to the federation’s appeal was an unrelated incident in which, on the 30th anniversary of Operation Bluestar, a Gandhi statue in Leicester was vandalised: someone clearly did not know Indira Gandhi, who ordered the assault on the Sikhs’ Golden Temple, from the Mahatma.