India Risks Slipping Into The Apartheid Mandela Fought

This year's Nelson Mandela International Day which fell on Mandela's birthday (18 July) - was marked by historic speeches that warned of an unprecedented assault on our democracy.

- Ndileka Mandela

However, they were all missing something. Something big.

In just weeks, India will mark 75 years of independence. Through principled and nonviolent resistance, the jewel in the British crown forced the West to confront the awful gap between the rhetoric of freedom and the fact of imperialism. Behind great leaders of different faiths - such as Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar and Azad India set out to become a pluralistic and secular democracy. But what will the country be like 75 years from now?

Mandela Day encourages us all to commemorate Nelson Mandela's - and the world's - efforts to end apartheid and promote peace, and I remember all that India did for South Africa.

For decades, while the West turned a blind eye to apartheid in my country, India stood with us, backed us, and advocated for us. In my grandfather, Nelson Mandela, we found our own Gandhi. In fact, Mahatma Gandhi was shaped by his early experiences in South Africa, his conscience stung by the racism and supremacism that once defined my country.

Mandela himself once praised Gandhi's role in creating what he called in 1991 the "first democratic political organ in Africa" with the help of South Africa's Hindu community. Indeed, Mandela and many in the African National Congress were staunch opponents of various efforts by the apartheid government to deport the country's large south Asian population.

But now I have a concern. I'm worried that the world's largest democracy, long a hope for the global South, is increasingly in danger of becoming what it once so selflessly confronted.