The post-mortem

Gandhi was, of course, murdered; shot point blank by Nathuram Godse who pumped three bullets into his chest with an M1934 Beretta semi-automatic pistol on the evening of 30 January 1948. This much is known or, at any rate, not disputed. Godse himself along with his accomplices stood trial. He and Narayan Apte were sentenced to death, and hanged on 15 November 1949 in the Ambala jail. They were cremated shortly thereafter in the jail compound. Then their ashes, mixed with soil, were immersed in the Ghaggar at an unmarked, undis-closed, and now therefore unknown spot.1 The Government was careful that there would be no memorial to Gandhi’s killers nor their relics ever used to strengthen the ideology they stood for. Godse’s personality cult, not to speak of his ideology, were, however, promoted and perpetuated textually and extra-textually by his brother and fellow conspirator, Gopal Godse. It is, of course, an entirely different matter that Gandhi himself was against judicial killings, being an opponent of capital punishment. Not only Jawaharlal Nehru but also Gandhi’s two sons petitioned against Godse’s hanging. Nevertheless, the State following its own laws and principles, the Indian Penal Code being largely a British creation, sent the two condemned men to the gallows to hang until they were dead.

The two assassins had a relatively quiet death, except that Godse, if eye-witness accounts are to be believed, struggled for over 15 minutes at the scaffold while Apte went quickly. Their cremation and the immersion of their ashes were hushed up, but it was not as if the Godse legacy ended quietly there. Nathuram’s younger brother, Gopal, was sentenced to life imprisonment for his role as accessory to the murder. After serving nearly 15 years, his sentence was commuted for good behaviour. On his release, he returned to Pune, his home town, where he was not only welcomed by his co-ideologists but, astonishingly, felicitated publicly on 12 November 1964 by a group of well-known citizens who still regarded Gandhi’s assassination as a national service.

Reports of this felicitation were published in the press, notably in the Indian Express of 14 November 1965. G. V. Ketkar, Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s grandson and well-known Pune resident, is said to have boasted that he knew of Nathuram’s plans before the latter actually shot Gandhi. These remarks created a furore in Mantralaya, where the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly, then dominated by the Congress Party, is housed. Some Members of the House complained to the Central Government that the whole truth of the conspiracy to assassinate the Mahatma had not yet been uncovered, that actually the number of culprits and wrongdoers might be considerably larger. The Central Government took the matter seriously enough to appoint, albeit several months later in 1966, a retired Supreme Court judge, Justice Jeevan Lal Kapur, to investigate. The learned judge took three years to inquire into the matter, questioning and cross-examining several hundred witnesses. The result was the Report of the Commission of Inquiry, an exhaustive document in six volumes, the result of the recalling and examination of all those witnesses and participants who were still alive 20 years after the event.

But even after the Report of the Kapur Commission, the issue of Gandhi’s death has not faded away. It has been remembered in book-length accounts and lengthy studies of several notable authors, the more recent of which have included those by Robert Payne, Ashis Nandy, and Gandhi’s own grandson, Tushar Gandhi. The latter’s retelling, Let’s Kill Gandhi, is nearly a thousand pages in length. More controversial is Pradip Dalvi’s Marathi play, Me Nathuram Godse Boltoy. The play was at first not found suitable for staging by the Maharashtra State Drama Scrutiny Board, but after the Hindu nationalist coalition of the Shiv Sena and Bharatiya Janata Party came to power, it was cleared in 1998. In a series of Marathi articles written in the same year and later collected as a book sarcastically entitled Nathuramayan, Y. D. Phadke offers a detailed and painstaking analysis of the distor tions and inaccuracies in this play, which Dalvi had claimed was based on ‘history’.

Phadke proves that the play, while pretending to be objective and balanced, tries to turn Godse into a hero and martyr instead of a misdirected assassin. One of the most egregiously insulting distortions in the play is that it shows Gandhi’s grandson, Devdas, then the Editor of Hindustan Times, visiting Godse in Ambala jail, offering to appeal against his death sentence by representing Godse in the Supreme Court of India, as if convinced of the ‘justness’ of his father’s murderer’s case. Phadke shows that not only is there no record of Devdas visiting Nathuram in the Ambala jail, nor was there a Supreme Court in India then; this figment of Dalvi’s imagination is meant only to show Gandhi’s own grandson exonerating Nathuram, thereby suggesting that viewers may also do the same. The facts, as Robert Payne has pointed out in The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi (1969), are rather the opposite. It was Godse who wrote to Ramdas Gandhi, because the latter, who had wanted him to repent, was willing to have a dialogue with him. But, ultimately, Ramdas and Godse never met (Payne 1969: 643) because the latter’s letter shows that he felt ‘convinced’ that he was right and that he could logically defend his action. He said he was more than willing to chant the Gita with Ramdas because he (Godse) believed that he had acted according to the Gita (ibid.: 645). Ramdas, it would appear, had no interest in meeting such an unrepentant assassin, so convinced of the correctness of his actions.

In another attempt to glorify Nathuram, Dalvi invents a police inspector called Sheikh who is not only present at the assassination, but is later assigned to Nathuram on guard duty. This Sheikh is shown to have a daughter, Zubeida, who in Bollywood style, offers flowers at the spot where Nathuram sits in the court room and, what is more, prays for his well-being at the mosque each day. Why should Zubeida come to love Nathuram and pray for him so devotedly? That riddle is never solved. Zubeida, moreover, is pregnant; Nathuram sends her a message through Sheikh:

If you really love this brother of yours, look after the baby in your womb. You will give birth to a son. Teach him my value. If another Gandhi is created on this soil, this country will need another Nathuram. We want Nathuram. Another Nathuram.

(Dalvi 1997 cited in Phadke 1 February 2001)

This cry for more Nathurams, born though they be to Muslim mothers, to kill the Gandhis to come is an incredible piece of effrontery by a playwright who claims to be ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’ in his portrayals of both Gandhi and Godse.

Dalvi’s play, Phadke demonstrates, is based mostly on Gopal Godse’s various publications. These include not only Nathuram’s own defence in the court, but also several ‘histories’ of the assassination that Gopal Godse penned after serving out his life-sentence as Nathuram’s co-conspirator. Indeed, these books may be considered as constituting a coherent discourse not only justifying the murder, but also providing the ideological basis for continuing anti-Gandhism. Part of the Godse myth as perpetrated by these texts consists in portraying him not as a misguided fanatic or an ordinary criminal but as a well-intentioned, rational, and clear-headed patriot. As Dalvi shows in his play, Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, in fact made no attempts either to flee or resist arrest. Instead, he actually waited to be apprehended even as the crowd around Gandhi ran helter-skelter in the ensuing melee. This was indeed his historic moment: for him to run away even if it were easy to do so, would have been self-defeating.

Godse, of course, was not alone; there was a conspiracy to kill Gandhi, as the Government had already uncovered. The conspirators were members or sympathizers of the Hindu Mahasabha, inspired by its president V. D. Savarkar. The latter himself stood trial and was acquitted for lack of sufficient evidence, but the suspicion that he was directly or indirectly involved in the murder lingers to this day.2 Later attempts were made to link the assassination to the Rashtriya Svayam Sevak (RSS), a right wing Hindu organization, which was banned for a few years immediately after the murder; however it flourishes today, the ban on it having been lifted within a couple of years of its banning. Godse, himself, had been a member of the RSS for some time but left it later.3 As Payne observes, ‘The attentive reader of the voluminous trial reports soon finds himself haunted by the certainty that many others who never stood trial were involved in the conspiracy’ (1969: 646).

It was obvious then as it is now that Gandhi’s assassins were Hindu nationalists who thought that he was the greatest obstacle to their goal to bring about a Hindu Rashtra or Hindu nation. India, although partitioned, had already become independent. Now they perhaps hoped that killing Gandhi would force the country to alter its ways to a course more favourable to their ideology, even if it did not convert it fully into a Hindu nation. These zealots hated what Gandhi stood for. They considered him the enemy of Hindu interests, holding him responsible for the Partition, which to them was an outcome of Gandhi’s favouring Muslims over Hindus.

The book May It Please Your Honour, in which Gopal Godse published his brother’s defence during the in-camera trial, is actually Nathuram’s elaborate and lengthy justification of his action as it is a cogent charge-sheet against Gandhi. A detailed political dossier, it outlines Nathuram’s own version of the history of the freedom movement and its ultimate failure to protect the interests of the Hindus. Much of this document is easily available on the Internet,4 which demonstrates its continuing currency. From the number of hits and comments that Nathuram’s indictment of Gandhi has attracted, it is clear that Godse still has many admirers, especially in the Indian diaspora. This attests not only to Nathuram’s rhetorical skills but also to widespread ignorance of the facts of the assassination, despite extensive documentation over the years. Nathuram cleverly conceals some facts, distorts others, and tells outright lies from time to time to create an image of an irrational and stubborn false ‘Mahatma’, the ‘Father of the Nation’ who holds his country to ransom with his fads, whims and fasts. The ‘victims’ of the Mahatma’s sins of omission and commission are, of course, the Hindus, whose self-sacrificing champion and saviour Nathuram projects himself to be. Gandhi’s killing, according to this retelling of it, is not a murder but a heroic execution conducted on behalf of the Hindus by Nathuram. While it is fair to listen to both sides of the story, the continuing championing of Godse by Hindu communalists remains puzzling if not distressing. Godse’s whole argument hinges on how the removal of Gandhi was the sacred duty of any patriotic Hindu. Godse actually invokes Gandhi’s favourite text, the Bhagawad Gita, to justify his actions. That the killers of Gandhi continue to occupy a space in India’s political spectrum as well as civil society is also borne out by the fact that Radha Rajan’s recent book, Eclipse of the Hindu Nation: Gandhi and His Freedom Struggle, reiterates many of Godse’s accusations under the guise of a new history of the freedom struggle. The cult of Nathuram survives, even flourishes, thanks to the efforts of his brother Gopal Godse and the numerous Hindu nationalists who support the ‘Godse thesis’ against Gandhi.

Notes

1  See Karan Thapar’s column in Hindustan Times where he reports an eyewitness account of these proceedings (Thapar 2007). Portions of this are reproduced in Tushar Gandhi’s book (2007: 644–645).

2  See for instance, A. G. Noorani’s Savarkar and Hindutva: The Godse Connection (2002).

3  According to Jean Alphonso Curran, Nathuram was a member of the RSS from 1932–1934; he left because the RSS did not intend to become a political organization (1951; 1979: 18–19). Godse added that he was not against the Congress either: ‘I wish to make it clear that I am not an enemy of the Congress. I have always regarded that body as the premier institution which has worked for the political uplift of the country’ (Godse 1989: 143). The controversy still smoulders; see for instance Neena Vyas’s report in The Hindu, ‘RSS releases ‘proof ’ of its innocence’ (18 August 2004).

4  See www.nathuram.com. This is a relatively new website, which I have not seen prior to the year 2012. Its motto is ‘Ek Hi Laksha – Hindu Rashtra’ (‘Only one objective – a Hindu nation’). Godse’s defence was also available at http://ngodse.tripod.comdefense.htm/ but the link is now dead (access failure 23 August 2013).