INDIA:The ashes of Mahatma Gandhi were scattered yesterday off India's western Mumbai coast in a ceremony marking the 60th anniversary of his assassination by a Hindu fanatic who opposed his policy of Muslim appeasement.
A copper urn containing the ashes was immersed in the Arabian Sea by his great-granddaughter, Nilamben Parikh, in accordance with Hindu rites.
"This is a day for deep thought. This day will help us think how to move forward," said 75-year-old Parikh who, with 10 family members, boarded a boat and travelled about a kilometre out to sea to perform the ritual.
Ms Parikh is descended from Gandhi's eldest son, Harilal, who had antagonistic relations with his father. He even refused to attend the Mahatma's funeral, contravening the Hindu tradition by which the eldest son lights the father's funeral pyre.
Parikh's participation in the ceremony has been described by family members as closure.
"Harilal Gandhi could never really fulfil his obligation," Gandhi's great-grandson Tushar Gandhi said in Mumbai. His grand-daughter did in some way what Harilal should have done, he added.
The Mahatma's ashes surfaced last year when an urn was sent by an Indian businessman to Mumbai's Mani Bhavan museum. Gandhi had lived there while visiting the city that was the focus of his political activities in gaining independence from Colonial rule.
It was one of 20 such urns distributed to towns and villages across India for memorial services following Gandhi's cremation after he was shot dead. He had been on his way to a prayer meeting in New Delhi, and the killing plunged the entire country deep into mourning.
In 1997, a similar urn was found in a bank locker in the eastern Orissa state and its contents immersed in a river.
Hindus cremate their dead and the ashes, in keeping with ancient ritual, are scattered in rivers or the sea after 13 days.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, later known as Mahatma ("Great Soul"), led a non-violent campaign against British rule that eventually saw India achieve independence in 1947.
But independence also greatly saddened Gandhi as it led to the subcontinent's partition into a broadly secular India and a Muslim Pakistan, an outcome he had always bitterly opposed but could do little about.