History records that on this day, 66 years ago, a most brutal of attacks
by a fanatical Hindu took away from our midst one whom half the world venerated
as a Saint – Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who in death as in life, attained the
cult status of a ‘Mahatma’, a pious soul.
Such was the inevitable fallout of the act that Nathuram Godse, the
killer, deposed, ‘With the shots I fired at Gandhiji, my own life too came to
an end’. An act of violent aggression followed by meek submission makes one
wonder as to what exactly was the mind frame of the assassin prior to the
killing. What exactly embittered his wisdom, his prudence to completely forsake
his identity, his respect among his peers and resort to an act that would
invite nothing but plain hatred from members of his own community?
That Nathuram was a bigoted Hindu is universally accepted. Belonging to a
clan of Chitpawan Brahmins, the descendants of the mighty Peshwas, he was one
among many who subsisted in the throes of a radical Hinduistic cult. But it is
also true that he was not a history-sheeter and apart from a few alleged
speeches that bordered on the vitriolic, did not have a criminal background. In
fact, he was believed to have been a follower of Gandhiji once, but his views underwent
a change once he became a member of the Hindu Mahasabha and came into contact
with Savarkar. Soon it led to utter dissent from a disapproval of the very
foundation of Gandhiji’s policies.
The fact that independence came at a price was something the militant
Hindu groups, including Nathuram, were unwilling to accept, morally or
politically. They believed Gandhiji’s cult of non-violence was tantamount to a
kind of ‘violent pacifism’ that ran concomitant with his soft-pedalling a
sensitive matter, leading to untold calamities on thousands of innocent members
of their clan. Nathuram was to say, ‘It is absurd to expect 40 crore people to
regulate their lives on such a lofty plane as non-violence’.
Truth to tell, it was Gandhiji’s teachings of absolute ‘Ahimsa’ that
Nathuram was strongly opposed to as according to him, it was so detrimental to
the cause of the Hinduism as to make it incapable at resisting inroads by other
religions, thereby leading to its possible emasculation. It was a thought
totally out of place but during the 1940s when the Hindu Sangathanist ideology
had taken roots, a militant school of thought had emerged which propagated the
view that for a true Hindu, the first duty was to serve Hinduism as a patriot
as it constituted the well-being of one-fifth of human race. It called for all
like-minded Hindus to fight as soldiers under a pan-Hindu flag and Nathuram, as
one of its chief protagonists, believed that in his act, he was only serving a
larger issue of ‘organized Hindu discontent’.
Nathuram had made a quizzical attempt at vainglory, ‘I have no doubt that
honest writers of history will weigh my act and find its true value some day’.
Well, in the six decades that have passed since, Gandhiji continues to be the
supreme most symbol of our National unity while historians still find the act of
the assassin as little more than the offshoot of a fanatical mind that had gone
beyond the pales of rational thought or understanding.
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