On this day, January 30, in 1948, Nathuram Godse killed Mahatma Gandhi.
“Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”
– Walter Benjamin, The Thesis on the Philosophy of History.
“In the first week of January 1948, I came to the conclusion that Gandhi, who had been constantly helping Pakistan, had to be killed. There was no other way to deal with Pakistan,” Nathuram Godse said in his pre-trial statement, recorded at the stage of interrogation.
Later as he anxiously tried to remove any traces of guilt from Savarkar and Narayan Apte and the other co-accused by denying the existence of a conspiracy, Godse revised his account and said that the assassination decision was taken after Gandhi had on January 13 started his indefinite fast, to compel India to pay Rs 55 crores to Pakistan, writes Dhirendra K. Jha in his book Gandhi’s Assassin: the Making of Nathuram Godse.
Seventy-seven years after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, his killer Nathuram Godse remains an inconvenient persona who can neither be accepted wholeheartedly, nor rejected resolutely by the Modi government and the leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh leaders. While Modi often leads foreign heads of states and governments – as he did during the G-20 summit in Delhi in 2023 – to the Gandhi Samadhi in Rajghat to offer prayers, his party MLAs and MPs routinely and brazenly express their admiration for Godse.
This problematic relationship with Godse stems from the fact that while they have publicly accepted his mentor V.D. Savarkar as the philosopher of the party for having given it its foundational ideology, Hindutva, they have had to sever all public links with Godse, because his confession to the court was too strong to be disowned.
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Godse in his statement to the court, later published as a booklet May It Please Your Honour says, “I stoutly maintain that Gandhiji failed in his duty which was incumbent upon him to carry out, as the Father of the Nation. He has proved to be the Father of Pakistan. It was for this reason alone that I as a dutiful son of Mother India thought it my duty to put an end to the life of the so-called Father of the Nation, who had played a very prominent part in bringing about the vivisection of the country – Our Motherland.”
One may well argue that the conditions of the country in 1947, the Partition, the brutal killings of almost a million Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims and the displacement of about 6 million people from their homes were such as to drive people to fanatical acts to avenge their personal tragedies. But Godse was not one of those uprooted refugees in Delhi. He was a well-settled family man who was restless to get into political action and public recognition. He was being trained to assassinate Gandhiji and he went through several rigorous rounds of tests that he was put to by his mentor Savarkar.
It began with his meeting with Savarkar in Ratnagiri in 1938, when he was advised to join the first batch of Hindu Mahasabha volunteers to fight the Nizam’s Razakars in Hyderabad. Immediately upon his entry in Hyderabad, he was detained and imprisoned for a year, which strengthened his resolve to fight for the ‘Hindu cause’. Savarkar’s confidence in the young man grew so much that in 1942, he asked Godse to form a secret volunteer organisation among a small group of disciples in the Pune Hindu Mahasabha. Savarkar required these volunteers to take an ‘oath of loyalty to him and perform underground activities that could not be sanctioned by the Mahasabha.’ The group’s primary objective was to propagate ‘Savarkarism’ as a way to protect Hindudom and render help to every Hindu institution in their attempt to oppose encroachment on their rights and religion. Accordingly, Godse formed the Hindu Rashtra Dal in Poona and another acolyte of Savarkar, Dr D.S. Parchure (who subsequently obtained the 9mm Beretta Automatic later described as the murder weapon) formed the Hindu Rashtra Sena in Gwalior. This shows that there was a symbiotic relationship between Savarkar and Godse, that of a guru and his disciple, and it is impossible to own one and disown the other.
Not many would know that Gandhi and Savarkar had met twice, in London, first in October 1906 and second time when they both addressed a public meeting in July 1909. Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay writes in his book The RSS: Icons of the Indian Right that Gandhi was so disturbed by this (second) meeting that “he wrote to Gopal Krishna Gokhale sharing his regret, especially about Savarkar’s viewpoint of adopting violence as a legitimate political tool to overthrow the British.”
Also read: Mahatma Gandhi and the Story of Two Temples
In a more perceptive reading of Savarkar, Vinayak Chaturvedi in his book Hindutva and Violence: V.D. Savarkar and the Politics of History writes: “…Savarkar and Gandhi had first disagreed about the centrality of violence during their public meeting in London in 1909. Both appeared to have conceptualized their ideas as counter arguments, without formally addressing each other. Neither wanted to cede the political vocabulary that shaped their thoughts on concepts like swaraj, civilization, Hindu, and violence. Nor were Gandhi and Savarkar interested in letting the other provide the normative interpretations of texts such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Ramayana. This was an epistemic battle for the domination of ideas with a violent end”.
We all know who met with the violent end and who was tried as one of the conspirators for the killing.
One question that always bothered me is how anyone professing to be a disciple of Swami Vivekananda, as prime minister Narendra Modi often claims, could also venerate Savarkar, a most resolute votary of violence, who had no tolerance for Islam and Christianity, who was against democracy and worshipped the fascist and Nazi dictators. The latter qualities reflect a personality type that Modi fashions himself to be. Swami Vivekananda is probably a cover story.
Ravi Joshi was formerly in the Cabinet Secretariat.
