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Sen. Hillary R. Clinton

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, known in the Indian community as an India lover and a top favorite with many, made what she later described on CNN as “a lame attempt at a joke” at an event in St. Louis which has elicited much heartache from the community.
The event was a fundraiser for Nancy Farmer, Missouri’s state treasurer, who is a Senate candidate. Senator Clinton introduced a quote from Mahatma Gandhi apparently to emphasize Farmer’s underdog status against a Republican Senator, Kit Bond.
According to Clinton’s press office, at the end of a lengthy speech, she said “I want to end with her (Farmer’s) favorite quote, because I love this quote, from Mahatma Gandhi ---- who ran a gas station down in St. Louis for a couple of years. Mr. Gandhi ---- (pointing to someone in the audience) Do you still go down to the gas station? A lot of wisdom comes out of that gas station. Mahatma Gandhi, one of the great leaders of the 20th century, said ‘First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you and then you win.’ So let me bring you someone who will fight and win ---- Nancy Farmer.”
Since then she has made a public apology which has been aired on television several times and an Associated Press story has been carried in several newspapers in the U.S. and India. On what appeared on CNN, she said: “It was a lame attempt at a joke. It was a dumb thing to say and I am sincerely sorry. I have only the highest regard for Mahatma Gandhi, and have been a longtime admirer of his life and work. I consider him one of the great leaders of the 20th century.”
In fact, in her book ‘Living History,’ published in 2003, Senator Clinton references the role of politics as a vehicle for change in democracy. She writes on page 37: “In my mind, Dr. King and Mahatma Gandhi had done more to bring about real change through civil disobedience and non-violence than a million demonstrators throwing rocks ever could.”
Clinton visited India in 1996. She was the first U.S. first lady to do so in over 30 years since Jacqueline Kennedy visited India. Since then she has almost never missed an opportunity to mention some aspect or the other of the trip which left her deeply moved.
On that trip, she traveled from New Delhi to Ahmedabad to visit Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram on the banks of the Sabarmati river, founded in 1917, two years after the Mahatma’s return to India from South Africa. The ashram was where the Mahatma developed and refined many of his social, cultural, religious ideas.
Respectful of Indian custom, she took off her shoes before going inside the rooms in which Gandhi lived and worked for 12 years.