The Mahatma’s handwritten article at Christie’s in London. (AFP)

New Delhi, June 27: India will bid for the draft of an article handwritten by Mahatma Gandhi days before his 1948 assassination, after Christie’s said it was too late to stop the auction.

The seven-page article — written behind a typed memorandum sent to the Mahatma on food distribution — is about Hindu-Muslim tolerance and the fate of Urdu.

Christie’s, which will sell the papers on July 3 as part of a larger collection of letters written by European historical figures, estimates the Gandhi draft could fetch between £9,000 and £12,000, or just under Rs 10 lakh.

Officials in the external affairs ministry said: “The ball is now in the culture ministry’s court. They will have to decide how much money they want to spend.”

It was too close to the auction date to buy the manuscript directly from Christie’s and avoid having to bid, the ministry said.

Some Gandhians in Delhi had heard about the auction and approached Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. His office then asked the culture ministry to find out if anything could be done. Later, the external affairs ministry told the Indian high commission in London to pursue the matter with Christie’s.

But the auction house said it could not stop the bid now.

On Tuesday, at a meeting chaired by culture secretary Badal K. Das, it was decided that the Nehru Memorial Library could purchase the Gandhi draft from the auction.

The manuscript is part of “The Albin Schram Collection of Autograph Letters’’, which Christie’s estimates is worth around £2 million (Rs 16 crore). Letters written by Napoleon, Isaac Newton, Charles Dickens, John Donne, Winston Churchill, Alexander Pushkin, Oscar Wilde and Elizabeth I are part of the collection.

Gandhi’s article, dated January 11, 1948, was apparently written for his newspaper Harijan. Titled “Urdu Harijan’’, the write-up speaks of his pain at having to close the Urdu edition. Gandhi was killed on January 30.

“The dwindle (in the sales of Urdu Harijan) was to me a sign of resentment against its publication,’’ Gandhi wrote, according to details released by Christie’s.

In the article, Gandhi dismisses suggestions of boycotting the Urdu script, saying the idea was a “wanton affront upon the Muslims, who in the eyes of many Hindus have become aliens in their own land.”. “This is copying the bad manners of Pakistan with a vengeance,’’ he wrote.

Gandhi believed there were limitations to the Urdu script, “but for elegance and grace, it will equal any script in the world”. He spoke highly of the potential of Urdu for shorthand and for transcription of Sanskrit verses.

In the article, he sought support from Muslims for Harijan’s Urdu edition and also exhorted them to learn the Devanagari script to “enrich their intellectual capital’’.