He was tried for murder in May and hanged in November the following year. Now that the light has gone out of our lives I do not quite know what to tell you and how to say it.
Our beloved leader is no more. The following day an enormous crowd estimated at nearly one million people lined the five-mile route of the funeral procession to the bank of the Jumna River as the body, draped in the Indian flag, was carried on an army truck while air force planes overhead dropped flowers.
Repeated incursions from the crowd meant that the journey took five hours and the police had to clear space by force while the bier was lifted onto the sandalwood funeral pyre and the body was cremated in the traditional manner.
As the flames burned, the grieving crowd showered the pyre with petals. The ashes were kept on the river bank for three days before they were taken away for immersion at the spot where the Jumna joins the Ganges. Despite the efforts of Nehru and other leaders, violence erupted in Bombay and elsewhere in India, with riots and arson. There were attacks on Brahmins, because the killer was a Brahmin. Police in Bombay had to open fire on the rioters. It was an outcome which would have profoundly horrified Gandhi himself.
Months Past. Instead, his idea of power mimicked that of the British, employing force to defeat the rulers, to give them a taste of their own medicine, so to speak.
For Gandhi, though, politics was not so much about defeating the British as it was about transforming the rulers, about making the colonial ruler realise the sheer immorality of the power they exercised. It was not about the end justifying the means. Then again, Gandhi did not perceive Hindus as a religious group, in the way followers of Semitic religions are, but a people spread over a land who believed in an open-ended system that forever incorporated new elements or reinterpreted the existing or old ones.
There was no one book, no one way of praying, no one body of rituals. Erroneously believing that the unity, organising capacity and missionary zeal of Muslims and Christians had enabled them to conquer India, he wanted Hindus to become a rigidly closed religious group as the followers of those religions were. However, the problem of caste had to be overcome to achieve this unity. Godse sought this by participating in programmes such as inter-dining. His second method of uniting Hindus was to identify and define the other, the Christians and Muslims, by subjugating them for the pain and torment their ancestors were supposed to have inflicted on them.
In assassinating Gandhi, Nathuram gave his otherwise ordinary life a new meaning. This was perhaps the reason why he pleaded with the government not to show him mercy and send him to the gallows. His masculinity had been asserted. He had sacrificed himself for promoting the idea of militant Hinduism. He had killed the man who was sacrilegiously turning Hindus effeminate. Godse acquired esteem through the assassination of Gandhi.
His new-age followers can find their esteem by turning militant, by vanquishing Muslims and Christians in the 21st century, or by converting them and bringing them back into the Hindu fold, in the hope of effacing these religions from the country.
It will then turn India akin to a modern European nation-state — one country, one religion — which is the model a large segment of the Hindu Right favours. This is as true of his new-age followers. His love, as also that of his followers, is destructively obsessive. They can neither accept competing ideas in the religious realm nor the free choice of the other.
It was this illegitimate passion of Godse which inspired him to kill Gandhi. It is this which usually inspires myriad outfits worldwide to hitch religion to the creed of violence. This post first appeared on Scroll. By providing your email, you agree to the Quartz Privacy Policy.
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