The ideology that killed the Mahatma

‘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)

Seventy-seven years after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, his killer Nathuram Godse remains a rather inconvenient persona who can neither be accepted wholeheartedly, nor rejected resolutely by the Modi Sarkar and the BJP/RSS leaders. While Prime Minister Narendra Modi frequently leads foreign dignitaries, as he did during the G-20 summit in Delhi (Sept 2020), to the Gandhi Samadhi in Rajghat, his party’s MPs and MLAs routinely and brazenly express their admiration for Godse. 

This problematic relationship with Godse stems from the BJP’s public acceptance of his mentor, V D Savarkar, as the ideological architect of Hindutva, while simultaneously needing to sever ties with Godse, whose courtroom confession is too strong to be disowned. 

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 the point is 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.

Thanks to his meeting with Savarkar in Ratnagiri in 1938, he got to join the first batch of Hindu Mahasabha volunteers to fight the Nizam’s Razakars in Hyderabad. Immediately on his entry in Hyderabad, he was detained and imprisoned for a year, which strengthened his resolve to fight for the Hindu cause. And 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 (Pune) and another acolyte of Savarkar D S Parchure (who subsequently obtained the Gun: ‘a 9mm Beretta Automatic’ later described as the murder weapon) formed the Hindu Rashtra Sena in Gwalior. This brief narration 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.” 

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, civilisation, 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. 

‘Gandhi’s death marked an important turning point in Savarkar’s political career. Though acquitted on the charge of conspiracy to kill Gandhi for lack of evidence, he was now largely viewed as the enemy, because his political opponents continued to associate him with the murder…. Savarkar also became aware that the essentials of Hindutva that he had articulated in the 1920s… were largely ignored in independent India but he considered this as a temporary phenomenon”, says Vinayak Chaturvedi. Whether Savarkar really thought so or not, Hindutva re-emerged as the prime mover of RSS and BJP’s route to power and capture of the State in 2014. The ideology that Savarkar propounded is the dominant and hegemonic ideology of the Ruling Class today.

Gandhi’s two cardinal principles--non-violence, dismissed as moral cowardice, and truth, overtaken by post-truth politics--stand eroded. One wonders: did Gandhi die in vain?

(The author was formerly in the Union Cabinet Secretariat)