India has given a grant of around 10 million rupees to the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation in South Africa to kick-start plans for a huge endowment fund to fight racism across the globe.
Indian High Commissioner Ruchi Ghanashyam presented the grant yesterday to the veteran freedom fighter who was a close confidante of the late President Nelson Mandela and spent just one year less than him in imprisonment as a political prisoner, most of them on Robben Island.
"During his recent state visit to South Africa, the Honourable Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the Nelson Mandela Foundation and interacted with prominent struggle heroes, including Kathrada," Ghanashyam said at the handing-over ceremony at the Indian Consulate in Johannesburg.
"Prime Minister acknowledged Kathrada's significant contributions to the freedom struggle in South Africa, where despite his advanced age, he leads a busy public life championing the cause of non-racialism and an equitable society in South Africa and around the world.
"Recognising the role of the Foundation and the work being done by them for the welfare of the people of South Africa and the Indian diaspora, the PM decided to extend the grant of ten million rupees (two-million-rands) to the Foundation," she said.
Although Kathrada was present to accept the cheque, the Executive Director of the Foundation, Shan Balton, spoke on his behalf.
"We cannot express sufficiently our gratitude to the government and people of India for this donation which will now start our '50 by 90' campaign," Balton said, adding, that the project aimed to raise an endowment of 50 million rands before Kathrada turns 90 in three years' time.
"The proceeds from the endowment will then ensure that long after all of us are gone, and even 50 years from now, the Foundation and our successors will be able to continue the important work of fighting racism," Balton said.
Former Minister in the Presidency Essop Pahad said although South Africa during the apartheid-era decades of white minority government had been the fountainhead of racism that supremacists from across the globe looked to as succour, racism was now rearing its head in places like Eastern Europe and the US.
"This support from the Indian government for the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation to fight such racism is just a continuation of what India and its people have been doing for South Africa since the country started the global anti-apartheid struggle in 1947," Pahad said.
Isu Laloo Chiba, another veteran of the struggle who served jail time with Mandela and Kathrada, said it was somewhat ironic that the sanctions India had imposed on apartheid-era South Africa for nearly four decades had also led to the important relationship between the two countries not being properly recorded.
Chiba called on the Foundation to use part of the donation from India to initiate a project to identify these unrecorded gaps in the very significant relationship between the two countries.The donation to the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation was the second in as many months.
In December, Ghanashyam also handed to the Nelson Mandela Foundation a two-million-rand donation that was earlier pledged by Modi during his visit.
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