Leicester city mayor on Gandhi statue: “There’s no prospect of us removing it”

Leicester city mayor Sir Peter Soulsby has assured locals that the Mahatma Gandhi statue on Belgrave Road is “safe”.

After the Black Lives Matter movement, a number of statues across the UK have been targeted by campaigners, including Gandhi’s iconic memorial on the Golden Mile. A petition with over 6,000 signatures had descried the anti-colonial campaigner as “facist, racist and sexual predator”.

Soulsby told LeicesterLive that the statue was paid by the local community for it to be put up in 2009 and that they he did not think he had the power to take it down.

Soulsby was cited in the publication saying, “There’s no prospect at all of us removing it. And I’m not sure we’d have the power to take it down anyway.

“It was a community effort to put it there to celebrate someone who, for all of us, was a very inspirational leader in India who inspired the rest of the world with his creed of non-violence.”

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