Gandhi, Godse and the RSS

This month we mark the 67th anniversary of the murder of India’s most famous figure. So why exactly did Nathuram Godse kill Mahatma Gandhi? After his arrest, Godse spotted Gandhi’s son Devdas, who was editor of a national newspaper. The encounter was described by Nathuram’s brother, coconspirator and fellow convict (though he was only jailed and not hanged) Gopal Godse, in his book Gandhi Ji’s Murder & After. The younger Gandhi has come to the police station in Parliament Street to see his father’s killer. Gopal Godse writes that Devdas “had perhaps come there expecting to find some horridlooking, blood-thirsty monster, without a trace of politeness; Nathuram’s gentle and clear words and his self-composure were quite inconsistent with what he had expected to see.”

Of course we do not know if this was the case.

Nathuram apparently tells Devdas: “I am Nathuram Vinayak Godse, the editor of a daily... Today you have lost your father and I am the cause of that tragedy. I am very much grieved at the bereavement that has befallen you and the rest of your family. Kindly believe me, I was not prompted to do this with any personal hatred, or any grudge or any evil intention towards you.”

Devdas replies: “Then why did you do it?”

Nathuram says “The reason is purely political and political alone!”

He asks for time to explain his case but the police do not allow this. In court, Nathuram explained himself in a statement, but the court banned it. Gopal Godse reprints Nathuram’s will in an annexure to his book. The last line reads: “If and when the government lifts the ban on my statement made in the court, I authorise you to publish it.”

So, what is in that statement? In it Godse makes the following points:

That he respected Gandhi and “above all I studied very closely whatever Veer Savarkar and Gandhiji had written and spoken, as to my mind these two ideologies have contributed more to the moulding of the thought and action of the Indian people during the last 30 years or so, than any other single factor has done.”

Godse felt about Gandhi that “the accumulating provocation of 32 years, culminating in his last pro-Muslim fast, at last goaded me to the conclusion that the existence of Gandhi should be brought to an end immediately. Gandhi had done very well in South Africa to uphold the rights and well-being of the Indian community there. But when he finally returned to India he developed a subjective mentality under which he alone was to be the final judge of what was right or wrong. If the country wanted his leadership, it had to accept his infallibility; if it did not, he would stand aloof from the Congress and carry on his own way.”

This led to thought of action against Gandhi because, in Nathuram’s view, “against such an attitude there can be no halfway house. Either Congress had to surrender its will to his and had to be content with playing second fiddle to all his eccentricity, whimsicality, metaphysics and primitive vision, or it had to carry on without him.”

The other charge is that Gandhi helped create Pakistan. There is a problem with Godse’s argument and it is this. He thinks Gandhi was enthusiastic about dividing India when everything in history tells us the case was the opposite. Little of what Nathuram says makes sense by way of logic. It is, contrary to his statement to Devdas, not politics that shaped his actions. It was his hatred of the secular ideology of Gandhi, the true Hindu spirit, that he is finally opposed to, having been brainwashed thoroughly by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

Writing on Gandhi in 1949, George Orwell said: “One may feel, as I do, a sort of aesthetic distaste for Gandhi, one may reject the claims of sainthood made on his behalf (he never made any such claim himself, by the way), one may also reject sainthood as an ideal and therefore feel that Gandhi’s basic aims were anti-human and reactionary: but regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!”

This is still the case in 2015, while Nathuram Godse’s complaints have vanished in the mists of time.

It is, contrary to Godse’s statement to Devdas, not politics that shaped his actions. It was his hatred of the secular ideology of Gandhi, the true Hindu spirit, that he is finally opposed to, having been brainwashed by the RSS.

Aakar Patel is a writer and columnist