India's contribution to the fight against apartheid has been highly praised by South Africa's freedom movement leaders. However, at the end of the war, the British administrators imposed stricter restrictions on the Indians in the Transvaal. He gained the support of a number of whites in South Africa, who quickly became supporters of the African cause.
The new government emphasized the wider context of the dispute between India and the Union of South Africa. The two items were merged in 1962 under the title "Apartheid Policy of the Government of the Republic of South Africa". It led by example by scrupulously implementing the resolutions of the United Nations and other international organizations.
Throughout the long struggle for independence, India always believed in the triumph of the liberation struggle in South Africa. South Africa is a microcosm of the world with people of different nationalities and races. India, with millions of people in South Africa who are descended from her, has clearly decided to give full support to the liberation struggle.
NATIONAL MOVEMENTS OF INDIA AND SOUTH AFRICA
A HISTORIC FRIENDSHIP
In the 1920s, the Indian National Congress began to advocate Asian solidarity and, with the arrival of Jawaharlal Nehru, the solidarity of all the oppressed people of the world. The partition of Africa by the imperial powers at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 and the subsequent rape of Africa were fresh in the minds of African leaders in South Africa. Both the Indian National Congress and the African National Congress welcomed the convening of the Congress of the Oppressed People against Imperialism in Brussels from 10 to 15 February 1927.
Shortly after that Congress, Indian leaders began to express strong support for the aspirations of Africans in South Africa and in other African countries. The relationship between the Indian National Congress and the ANC did not develop further for several years due to the situation in South Africa. Some of them worked in the trade union movement with the Africans, and some had been influenced by the European radical thought of the 1930s.
He even remarked that India's future might be decided by the Indians' struggle in South Africa. He attended the conference of the Transvaal Indian Congress in 1946 and declared full support for the Indian passive resistance movement. The Indian Passive Resistance Council, itself engaged in a difficult struggle, made all its resources available to the African Mineworkers' Union.
Bassner, a senator representing African constituents, and received the active support of the Indian delegation to the United Nations. Discussions between the ANC and the Indian congresses continued after the return of the delegation from New York. India continued its unequivocal support to the liberation struggle in South Africa; but in the early 1960s his solidarity became somewhat passive and routine.
However, passivity has become completely unsustainable due to the growing crisis and confrontation in southern Africa and the efforts of the South African regime to intimidate the frontline countries. He took his responsibility as the chairman of the African Fund of the Non-Aligned Movement seriously.
GANDHIJI AND THE STRUGGLE FOR LIBERATION IN SOUTH AFRICA 1
The satyagraha in South Africa was not just a struggle for the rights of Indians or the redressal of their grievances, but a part of India's struggle for freedom and dignity. Out of his close association with the Muslims of South Africa, and their great contribution to the campaign of passive resistance, came his stress on Hindu-Muslim unity as a principle of the Indian national movement. While he had confined the first satyagraha in South Africa to the Indian and Chinese settlers whose security was threatened, he gave his blessings to the Dadoo-Naicker leadership's efforts to build a united democratic front.
He was, in a way, a patron of the movements, both in India and among the Indians of South Africa. The Indian people of South Africa benefited from the lessons of their own satyagraha of 1907-1914, as well as the experience of the Indian national movement. The Indian satyagraha was the forerunner of the great African-led nonviolent resistance in 1952, aptly named the "Campaign of Defiance against Unjust Laws" and indeed the beginning of mass resistance in South Africa.
Leaders of freedom movements in many colonial countries acknowledge Gandhiji's inspiration. Satyagraha has succeeded to the extent that it has awakened public opinion in the opposition camp and beyond in order to restrain and put pressure on the oppressors. It is therefore understandable, at least, that the leaders of the liberation movement felt that violent resistance was necessary.
I want to briefly trace the course of the liberation struggle, in the context of violence and non-violence, to underline this conclusion. One of the first mass actions of the ANC was the 1919 campaign against the pass laws, reminiscent of the Indian satyagraha in South Africa a few years earlier. Only one person - a police informant in the Eastern Cape - was killed by the ANC underground while the regime tortured several leaders of the people to death.
But Oliver Tambo, the President of the ANC, declared last year that the ANC was against it. Written on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of Gandhiji's imprisonment in South Africa.
PANDIT NEHRU AND THE UNITY OF THE OPPRESSED PEOPLE OF SOUTH AFRICA
His attitude did not represent a lack of respect for the rights and aspirations of the African people. India's complaint to the United Nations regarding the treatment of Indians in South Africa was heard shortly after Jawaharlal Nehru became head of the Provisional Government in September 1946. The Indian delegation ensured that India's advocacy of the rights of people of Indian origin took place in the context of opposing any form of racial discrimination.
Jawaharlal Nehru was always responsive to the requests of the leaders of the movement in South Africa. While exhorting Indians abroad to identify with the legitimate aspirations of the indigenous people, he educated Indian public opinion to recognize that the problem of Indians in South Africa was inseparable from the struggle of the African people. 34;The issue of people of Indian descent in South Africa has really merged into larger issues where not only Indians are affected but the entire African population along with it.
By that time the movement in South Africa had made tremendous progress in bringing about the unity of the oppressed people, as well as the democratic whites, as Nehru had envisioned in 1927. He advised a postponement of passive resistance - while contacting General Smuts and the Indian government to secure the abandonment of the loathsome architect of all oppressors - he became a loathsome architect of all oppressors. to end racist tyranny.
The African National Congress honored him in 1955 with the award of the Isitlawandle Seaparankoe decoration. Dadoo to strengthen the organization of the Indians and develop unity with the Africans. The interaction of Gandhism and Marxism perhaps enhanced the significance of the Indian satyagraha of 1946-48 and made it the rehearsal for mass resistance by all the oppressed people of South Africa.
Most of the Indians had been born in South Africa and saw the rise of African political consciousness. Pandit Nehru advocated a united front of the oppressed people and advanced sections of the whites, in South Africa and elsewhere, since the Brussels Congress against Imperialism in 1927. Along with a party of fellow students, she issued a statement welcoming "the new awakening of the exploited and oppressed nationalities of South Africa".
The campaign of non-violent defiance was not only a major milestone in the long struggle of the South African people, but it had a much wider significance.
INDIAN SLAVES IN SOUTH AFRICA
A little-known aspect of Indian-South African relations
When her husband died in 1689, Angela took control of the estate, which had a considerable value when she died in 1720. Some of these early slaves—especially women from Bengal who were procured by senior officials of the Dutch India Company for domestic work—were relatively fortunate. Most of the Asian slaves worked on the farms and were treated just as cruelly as the Africans.
The slaves were almost always given Christian names, but their places of origin were indicated in sales records and other documents, so it is possible to get an idea of the relationship between slaves from different regions - Africa (mainly Guinea and Madagascar) and Asia (India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka). Bradlow compiled available information from various scientific studies on the places of origin of the slaves and the free blacks between 1658 and the beginning of the nineteenth century. If these figures are representative, over 70 percent of the foreign-born slaves in the Cape came from Asia and more than a third from India.
The Indians became part of the "Malay" community - so called because Malay-Portuguese was the lingua franca in Asian ports at the time - and their descendants were later identified as. In fact, there is reason to believe that many of the slaves - far too many of them were children, not even ten years old - had been kidnapped in India. Countless children are transported out of the country with the Dutch and especially the French ships...".
Intermarriage between white and Asian slaves was quite common in the 17th and 18th centuries, and many studies show that half or more of the children of slaves had white fathers. In Die Herkoms van die Afrikaner, Heese presented the results of research into parish registers and other sources on Afrikaner ancestors. He found that between 1660 and 1705, 191 settlers from Germany married or lived with women who were not pure European.
Of the women, 114 were born in the Cape (most likely mixed), 29 were Bengali and 43 were from other Asian regions. He estimated that in 1807, between 7.2 and 10.7 percent of the ancestors of the then living African population were African and Asian.
