Introduction
One of the most touching events in the heart of every Indian till date is the assassination of the father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi in the morning of 30th January, 1948. There have been contentions from both sides of the boat with several people having their own opinions about the accused and the deceased. Nathuram Godse is still considered as one of the most hated names in Indian History. With one bullet, he wiped out the existence of a person who had been a legend and a person who had been a constant embodiment of peace and harmony not only for India but the world at large.
The fact remains that Nathuram Godse was not repentant in the very least. Throughout his trial, he showed a calm face and his speech shows the personality of the man who could act in such a manner. Reality always differs from ignorant popular beliefs brought in by propaganda. This is what happened in the general belief regarding the Mahatma Gandhi murder case. Brought down to the level of an election propaganda subject, the issue of Gandhi murder case has been exploited by the very party, which though garlanded the photo of Gandhi, had treated him (to quote Gandhi himself) like a ‘sweeper’. Ceased to be even a four ana member of the Indian National Congress,( Ajithkumar M.P, The Man who murdered Gandhi) Gandhi turned out to the leading Congress workers something moth-like to be brushed aside with indifference. And had he lived for more years than he did, he would have been spurned with vengeance by his own party workers to whom the Gandhian ideals would have proved real hindrance in their unscrupulous way to eke out a recklessly luxurious life.
By the time India got independence Congress had changed so much, had been irreparably damaged to the state of being not only non-Gandhian but anti-Gandhian too. The prestigious patriotic outfit of India, which enjoyed the leadership of the leonine figures like Lajpatroy, Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal, C R Das, Sri Aurobindo, and Gandhi later, became the asylum of unscrupulous politicians with no regard for the people or democratic values. Naturally in a party wherein bandicoots abounded Gandhi became an odd man deservedly to be out. The Congress had thus completed the ideological murder of the Mahatma prior to his being physically assassinated by Godse. And even the physical assassination, the Congress workers and leaders have been exploiting at the hustings as a political bullet against their enemies. No doubt it was Godse who physically assassinated Gandhiji. But he did not continue to kill Gandhiji and his lofty ideals, like the political bandicoots falsely claiming to be the descendents of Gandhian tradition.
Trial
It is important that one may take into account many unknown aspects of this most serious case, which shuddered the conscience of our nation as well as the entire world. First, Nathuram Vinayak Godse, the first accused in the case was never guilty conscious of what he did and which he firmly believed was for the sake of his nation. He justified his action in his one hundred and fifty points statement presented to the jury wherein he accused Gandhiji as having “proved to be the Father of Pakistan” instead of the “Father of the nation; an epithet of high reverence”. Gandhiji, Godse accused, through the successive policies like the support given to the extra territorial and purely communal issue of Khilaphat, the moral support to Suhrawardy, the final silence over the plan of partition, the post-partition days’ fasting to mobilize money to Pakistan and many such pro-Muslim policies was pampering the venom of Muslim communalism. The Father of the nation forgot his “paternal duty”, he said in his statements. And to the very time of his being hung to death he stuck to his own convictions.
We may also look into the statements of Justice G D Khosla who was involved in the Gandhi murder case trial. Concluding his book The Murder of the Mahatma, Khosla wrote, “I have no doubt that had the audience of that day been constituted into a jury and entrusted with the task of deciding Godse’s appeal, they would have brought in a verdict of ‘not guilty’ by an overwhelming majority”. But to quote Godse, his life also came to an end simultaneously with the shots fired by him at Gandhiji. And the reasons for the trial done in secrecy and the authorities’ reluctance to reveal before the public Godse’s replays to the charges leveled against him still remain something enigmatic. He walked away to the gallows, carrying with him in his hands the Bhagavad Gita, the map of undivided Hindustan and a Saffron flag.
On Friday 30 January 1948, Gandhi woke up at his usual hour, 3:30 a.m. After the Morning Prayer he put the final touches to the new constitution for Congress which he had been unable to finish the previous night. The rest of the morning was spent answering letters. Someone mentioned the fact that despite his poor health he was working incessantly. ‘Tomorrow’, he explained, 'I may not be here'. He was aware of the strengthening of the police guard around the Birla House, but notwithstanding Home Minister Patel's earnest request, Gandhi would not permit those who attended the prayer meetings: ‘If I have to die I should like to die at the prayer meeting. You are wrong in believing that you can protect me from harm. God is my protector.’
Gandhi, a little vexed at being unpunctual, that day, after meeting the Patels, made his way to the prayer meeting. Leaning lightly on the two girls, Manu and Abha, his walking sticks', he took a short cut accross the grass, walking briskly to make up for the lost time and then mounted the six low steps upto the level of the prayer ground. As he took a few paces in the direction of the wooden platform on which he sat during services, the crowd opened to enable him to pass through, bowing to his feet as he went by. Gandhi took his arms off the girls’ shoulders and for a moment stood there smiling, touching his palms in the traditional greeting-blessing.
Just then a man with a bushy shirt with khaki pants charged in, and when he was directly in front of Gandhi, he fired three shots into the Mahatma at point blank range. The Mahatma's hands folded in friendly greeting, descended slowly. ‘He Ram (Oh God Rama),’ he murmured, and sighed softly as the frail body slumped to the ground. The assassin was held by the Police. He was Nathuram Godse, an editor of a Marathi newspaper, Hindu Rashtra and an active and fanatic member of the Hindu Mahasabha. Gandhi was carried indoors, but he was already unconscious. Within a few moments a doctor pronounced him dead. Patel, who lived not far from Birla House, had hardly reached home when he rushed back. A few minutes later Nehru arrived. Soon one of Gandhi's disciples appeared at the door of Birla House to speak to the anxiously waiting crowd: ‘Bapuji is finished.’ A moan went up from the crowd. An epic in the saga of Indian and world history had ended. The world had lost yet another of its great sons to the hands of religion. A nation’s destiny was dead. The world’s tutor was dead.
Nathuram Godse was arrested soon after, and was taken to the nearby Tughlaq Road police station. A reporter who managed to see him briefly in a cell at the police station asked him whether he had anything to say. He defiantly said, “For the present I only want to say that I am not at all sorry for what I have done the rest I will explain in court”. Preliminary investigations revealed that he was the editor of a Marathi newspaper - Hindu Rashtra and a well-known member of the Hindu Mahasabha. Clean-shaven, sober, intelligent, the thirty-seven-year-old bachelor hardly seemed a candidate for the role of assassin. From time to time he had written scathing editorials denouncing Gandhi and the Congress party, though acquaintances could not recall an occasion when he had spoken bitterly against the Mahatma. He had no personal hatred of Gandhi.
Godse even stated in his trial, 'Before I fired the shots I actually wished him well and bowed to him in reverence. He said, “Godse was an RSS activist who left the organisation in 1932. They were particularly opposed to the separatist politics of the All India Muslim League. They had initially backed Gandhi's campaigns of civil disobedience against the British government. However, Godse and his mentors later turned radical and rejected Gandhi. They felt that Gandhi was sacrificing Hindu interests in an effort to appease minority groups. They blamed Gandhi for the Partition of India, which left hundreds of thousands of people dead. Godse assassinated Gandhi on January 30, 1948, approaching him during the evening prayer, bowing, and shooting him three times at close range with a Beretta semi-automatic pistol. Immediately after this, he surrendered himself to police. During the trial, he did not defend any charge and openly admitted that he killed Gandhi.
It is an irony of history that the Mahatma who led India’s pilgrimage to freedom ceased to be even an ordinary member of the Indian National Congress in the evening of his life. It may not be surprising to hear that it was Gandhi’s suggestion to give the Prime Ministerial chair to Jinnah as the last ditch attempt to avoid the partition, a suggestion that dashed itself on the rock of Nehru’s power hunger. Such an act, Gandhiji knew, would make Jinnah’s contention that in a Hindu ruled India Muslims would be a suffering lot untenable. But by that time Gandhiji had become an archaic object to be defied and defiled at will to the new leader who claimed himself as the great disciple of Gandhiji. However, it would surely be most surprising to know that the very Father of the nation was the only individual who never saluted India’s National Flag!
On November 1948, he was allowed his day in the sun when he rose to make his statement. Reading quietly from a typed manuscript, he sought to explain why he had killed Gandhi. His thesis covered ninety-pages, and he was on his feet for five hours. Godse’s statement should be quoted extensively, for it provides an insight into his personality. False propaganda had always an ample bearing upon the political psyche of the people with the result that political parties tried to tarnish the image of their opponents by blackmailing them with allegations, which may bring national chorus of disapproval upon the latter. No example would be more fitting for this than the allegation the Indian National Congress leveled against its most implacable foe, the Bharathiya Jana Sangh, the predecessor of the present BJP, which was backed by the RSS, that an RSS man had murdered Mahatma Gandhi.
The BJS spearheaded in Indian politics and Parliament by Dr. Syama Prasad Mookherji was a terror to the leaders with their heads sparse of both hair and ideas. His personal integrity, pugnacious patriotism and the undaunted sincerity in regard to each and every issue that adversely affected the national cause were qualities the Nehruvians hated. And it became a political imperative that the rightist wing of Indian politics was to be cowed down, and they designed many weapons to this end. One of them, indeed the most powerful, was the story of RSS and Gandhi murder. Otherwise what was the need of the Congress workers’ stereotyping the allegation even as all the evidences regarding the Mahatma’s murder ran in contrast to the cooked up story of the RSS involvement? Or was it indeed an RSS man that killed Gandhiji? Evidences rule it out. Sardar Vallabhai Patel, the then Home Minister of India wrote to Jawaharlal Nehru on 27 February 1948 that amidst many findings regarding the Mahatma’s murder “It also clearly emerges from the statements that the RSS was not involved in it at all”. It is interesting to note that Sri. C K Daphtary, the then Advocate General, Bombay who was in charge of the prosecution did not involve RSS in the controversy. The prosecution did not even hint, much less prove even the remotest connection of RSS with the murder of the Mahatma. RSS is not blamed anywhere in the judgement delivered in the case.
Not even a single inquiry the Government of India later made into the Mahatma Murder case involved the RSS in it. In 1966 the government set up a commission under Sri. J L Kapur, a retired judge of the Supreme Court, to make a fresh and thorough inquiry into the conspiracy that led to the murder of Gandhiji. The Commission, which sat at different places and examined about 101 witnesses and 407 documents, published its reports in 1969. It nowhere blamed RSS as the Gandhi assassin, and cleared the organisation of any connection with the crime. One of the important witnesses, Sri R N Banerjee, ICS (witness 19) who was the Home Secretary of the Central Government at the time of Gandhi murder had given the evidence that “It has not been proved that they (the accused) were members of the RSS”.(Kapur Commission Report) The witness further says that even if the RSS had been banned earlier, it would not have affected the conspirators or the course of events, “because they have not been proved to have been members of the RSS nor has that organization been shown to have a hand in the murder”.
R N Banerjee further stated, “Although RSS was banned it should be taken to be an acceptance by the Government of the allegation that the murder of Mahatma Gandhi was by the members of RSS as such”. The Commission further comments: “In Delhi also there is no evidence that the RSS as such was indulging in violent activities as against Mahatma Gandhi or the top leaders of the Congress”. The facts are thus by all means self evident and more eloquent than all the propaganda by the interested parties. RSS was thus not the organization that assassinated Mahatma Gandhi.
Though the non communal contentions brought by Nathuram Godse can be somewhat allowed as the same contentions were levelled against him by Bhagat Singh and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose alike, the communal contentions cannot be allowed to be given as Gandhiji time and again preached and practised a completely secular form of life. Moreover, Godse had questioned his manners of preaching. This is not a valid contention as a person has the complete liberty to preach according to his own preferred method.
Hence we find the issue is still debatable and can be questioned. But the author humbly submits that any factor would have been too small to find an excuse as to assassinate Mahatma Gandhi.
BARNIK GHOSH is a 2nd year student pursuing B.A. LL.B (Hons) from Gujarat National Law University, Gandhinagar (Ahmedabad) who has written this report for India Law Journal. He also advises India Law Journal on issues of importance. He can be reached at barnikghosh@gmail.com.
