Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi
Mohandas Gandhi was walking to an evening prayer meeting in the garden of Birla House in New Delhi on 30 January 1948 when Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist and former member of the RSS, stepped forward and fired three shots at close range. Gandhi died within minutes, still clutching his prayer beads. He was 78. Godse, who believed Gandhi had weakened Hinduism and enabled Pakistan through his insistence on Hindu-Muslim reconciliation, was arrested immediately and hanged in 1949. Gandhi's assassination removed the dominant voice for Hindu-Muslim reconciliation at the moment of Partition's worst violence and established the permanent vulnerability of India's founding secular-pluralist vision to Hindu nationalist politics. It also froze Gandhi's image — the fasting saint killed by the violence he had opposed — making him a global symbol of non-violent resistance that could be deployed by movements from the American civil rights movement to South African anti-apartheid, detached from the specific failures of his political project in its final years.
- Year: 1948 CE
- Category: Political
