Mahatma was failure in S Africa: Naipaul


New Delhi, January 10: Nobel laureate V S Naipaul and his wife, Nadira, on Friday created a flutter at the three-day NRI convention with the former saying Mahatma Gandhi was a "failure" in South Africa and she putting a poser on Vajpayee's secular credentials following Gujarat violence.

In his forthright remarks, Naipaul said the 20 years spent by Gandhi in South Africa ended without any success. "He was a failure".

The positive aspect of the failure was that Gandhi clearly saw the emergence of an independence movement in India and returned home on January 9, 1915, he said.

He regretted that many from the Indian Diaspora who could have contributed in a multi-faceted way in nation building were turned away.

"We should stop blaming the British for everything and look inwards," he said adding he was dropping a stone that he hoped would create ripples.

Even as the organisers announced that the scheduled question-answer session with Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani was being done away with, Nadira asked if the Vajpayee government was more favourable towards Hindus than Muslims, Christians and people of other faiths.

Advani assured the Indian Diaspora that his government would never discriminate against any one on the ground of faith or religion.

An avid reader, Advani released the Hindi version of Naipaul's award-wining book 'Beyond Belief' and surprised the Nobel laureate by asking him to autograph the English version he had brought with him. Naipaul readily obliged.