The controversy surrounding the proposed auction of the letter of Mahatma Gandhi, written shortly before his assassination, finally came to an end on Monday after Christie decided to withdraw it from auction. The London based auction house was to put the letter for bidding on 3rd July.
It is being assumed that the letter will now be handed down to the Indian government. Reports indicate that Christie’s would now hand it over to India after some negotiations.
The Culture Ministry had earlier asked the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, which has the bulk of Gandhi`s writings, to bid for the letter.
The letter was written 19 days before Gandhi was assassinated on 30th January 1948 by a religious fanatic, who opposed his tolerance towards Muslims. The freedom movement leader pleaded for religious harmony in newly independent India.
"It is wrong to ruffle Muslim or any other person`s feelings..." Gandhi said in the seven-page letter.
Gandhi was writing at a time of deep Hindu-Muslim tensions in India following independence from Britain in 1947.
The letter for a magazine founded by Gandhi had been priced at around 12,000 pounds (24,000 dollars).
The rare letter was part of a collection titled "the Albin Schram Collection of Autograph Letters", a personal and private collection assembled over a period of 30 years by Albin Schram, a Switzerland-based collector.
The collection now includes 569 lots of handwritten manuscripts by many notable figures of European history from the 13th to 20th Centuries, including Napoleon, Winston Churchill, Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde.
