LONDON.- A lost image of Mahatma Gandhi which has surfaced in London and should end up in the office of India’s Prime Minister says its discoverer, Indar Pasricha.

A neighbour of Tony and Cherie Blair in Connaught St, London, the well known art gallery owner, Indar Pasricha, recognized Gandhi's signature on this portrait when he found the Mahatma’s name misspelled in an auction catalogue in South Kensington and managed to buy it for a fairly modest few thousand pounds. The auction house had not indicated that Gandhi had signed the portrait.

The picture was made when Gandhi was in London fighting for his country's independence at the Second Round Table Conference.

Churchill previously described him thus: "It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious middle temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the king-emperor." ---Winston Churchill, 1930

It is of great significance that. C.E.M.A., the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, the predecessor of the Arts Council had exhibited this portrait during the War in 1942 43.

The artist Jacob Kramer had been invited by Gandhi to capture his likeness for posterity. The image made with black and white chalk on buff paper is a happy one showing this great icon of peaceful protest smiling mischievously, wearing a shawl and seemingly aware that he had the British Establishment on the run.

Now, 85 years later, a statue of Gandhi is being prepared for a place in Parliament Square where it will stand a stone's throw from the brooding bulk of the Churchill sculpture, Nelson Mandela and Jannie Smuts - all men marked forever by their time in South Africa. Gandhi practiced law in Durban. The sculpture will be erected in 2016 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s birth in 1869.

Speaking about his latest find, the Mahatma drawing Indar Pasricha says: "I do hope that this remarkable work goes back to India where ideally it should find a home in the Prime Minister’s office, as Mr Modi has been greatly inspired by Gandhiji.” He added: “The fact that the drawing shows Gandhiji laughing is very good as, like the current Dalai Lama, he was always smiling.”In a speech in New York this past week Prime Minister Modi referred again and again to the Mahatma as his inspiration and political guide.

Pasricha is confident that a buyer will emerge who will take this important image, made at a key moment of India’s history, to the sub continent where it belongs, a reminder that peaceful solutions like those found by the subject of this intriguing portrait are the solution to many of today’s problems.

Indar Pasricha is best known for building bridges between India and his adopted country, Britain. He is also a great champion of the paintings of that other great icon of 20th century India, Rabindranath Tagore. Better known as a writer and Poet but now recognized as the most significant Indian artist of the 20th century.