Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi
Nathuram Godse shot Mohandas Gandhi three times at close range in a Delhi garden on 30 January 1948, five months after independence. Gandhi was seventy-eight and had spent the preceding year not celebrating. He had walked through Noakhali and Bihar trying to stop communal killing, had been absent from the independence ceremonies, and had fasted in Calcutta and again in Delhi in January 1948 to stop riots — the second fast ending when leaders of every community signed a pledge, and after he had pressed the Indian government to pay Pakistan 550 million rupees it was withholding. That payment is what Godse cited. Godse was a Hindu nationalist from Pune, a former member of the RSS and an activist in the Hindu Mahasabha, who edited a Marathi newspaper and had made a previous attempt at Gandhi's life days earlier with accomplices, using a bomb that failed. He argued at his trial, at great length, that Gandhi's insistence on non-violence had left Hindus defenceless and that partition and the concessions to Muslims were his responsibility. He was hanged in 1949. The killing had immediate political consequences: the RSS was banned for over a year, and Hindu nationalism was politically marginal for three decades afterwards, largely because of it. Nehru announced it on the radio saying that the light had gone out of their lives, and then corrected himself to say that the light would be seen for a thousand years. The cremation drew perhaps a million people. Godse's statement was banned in India for decades and circulates freely now, and shrines and statues to him have appeared since 2014. Whether Gandhi is a national father or a national grievance is an argument that is more open in India today than it was in 1980.
- Year: 1948 CE
- Category: Political
