Gandhi's Assassin , livre ebook

DHIRENDRA K. JHA

GANDHI’S ASSASSIN
The Making of Nathuram Godse and his Idea of India
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Contents
Section I: Ploy
Nathu
Savarkar vs Gandhi
The Brahmins of Bombay
Sangh and Sabha
Ramachandra Becomes Nathuram
An Army
And a Newspaper
Psychosexual Pangs
Gandhi, Commit Suicide
Section II : Plot
The Plan
Alibi
Reconnaissance
Simple-minded Hunter
Godse Finds His Gun
A Shot Shatters the Winter Evening
The Interrogations
The Assassin Is Tried
The Gallows
Author s Note
Illustrations
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE BOOK
In Gandhi s Assassin , Dhirendra K. Jha has anatomized, with calm resourcefulness, the politics and psychology of a fanatic. He has also written a secret and sinister history of modern India-the one we need to understand our ruinous present -Pankaj Mishra, author
This book goes beyond the plot that resulted in Mahatma Gandhi s assassination, which the author meticulously analyses. It is indeed highly revealing of the omnipresence of the RSS on the Indian political scene in the 1940s. If the organization did not fight British colonialism and did not contest elections, it was intimately related to Savarkar s Hindu Mahasabha, the first Hindutva party, and, more importantly, organically linked to the Hindu Rashtra Dal, a militant body co-founded by Nathuram Godse-a man who, as Dhirendra K. Jha shows, never left the RSS -Christophe Jaffrelot, research director, CERI, Sciences Po and CNRS, and Avantha Professor of Indian Politics and Society, King s India Institute
Dhirendra Jha s book is not just a very readable and credible account of the plot and the people behind Gandhi s murder, including a psychological analysis of his assassin, but a comprehensive study of the wider politics of the Hindu Mahasabha, the RSS and their leaders, including Savarkar, which makes it a must-read and highly relevant in today s context -Mridula Mukherjee, Professor, Modern Indian History (retired), Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Section I: Ploy
1
Nathu
Nathuram Godse s head ached but his eyes remained fixed on the entrance to the lawn of Birla House. A wing of this grand New Delhi mansion served as the living apartment for Mahatma Gandhi. Blending into the crowd gathered in the lawn, Godse waited stealthily about ten paces from the main gate, positioning himself right along the way Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi would take to reach the wooden podium from which he led his evening prayer meetings. From his reconnaissance of the prayer ground, Godse knew that Gandhi could appear at any moment. It was quarter past five in the evening on Friday, 30 January 1948. The air was cool on his face, and above him the sky had turned grey, almost ready to be enveloped in darkness.
The assemblage stirred. Godse saw Gandhi emerge at the entrance, flanked by two young women, his grand-nieces. Manu was on his right and Abha to his left. Gandhi stopped for a moment. His face lit up with a smile. Letting go of the shoulders of his grand-nieces, he brought his palms together in a namaskar to greet the assembled crowd. 1
Godse reached for the pistol in his pocket and released the safety. 2 He waited. There was no panic, just a vague disquiet. Gandhi then walked quickly towards the podium, the crowd opening to enable him to pass through. As he came close, Godse pushed his way roughly past Manu as if to touch his feet, a practice Gandhi disliked. Manu tried to stop Godse, saying that they were already late. Scarcely had she spoken when he violently jerked her away. She stumbled backwards, Gandhi s rosary, the case for his glasses, his spittoon, and her pen and notebook-articles she always carried to the prayer meeting-falling from her hands. 3
Then, in one furious movement, Godse stepped in front of Gandhi, his hands folded over his pistol. Now I stood at a distance of one and a half feet from Gandhi, Godse recounted, I said namaste Gandhiji, and then I pointed at his chest and fired. 4 A total of three shots were fired in quick succession at almost point-blank range. One bullet hit Gandhi in the chest and two in the abdomen. 5 At the first shot, Gandhi s foot, which was in motion, faltered, but he still stood, his palms still joined in a namaskar. When the second and third shots rang out, he collapsed, uttering his last cry: Hey Ram! 6 It was seventeen minutes past five.
The horrified crowd, nearly 200 in number, looked stunned. Herbert Reiner Jr, a young official of the US Embassy in Delhi, who stood nearby, was the first to realize what had happened. People were standing as though paralysed, he said in his statement to the New York Herald Tribune , I moved around them, grasped his [Godse s] shoulder and spun him around, then took a firmer grip on his shoulders. 7
The 32-year-old American, who was in India as disbursing and financial officer for the US State Department, had visited Gandhi s prayer meeting on the advice of his mother, who had written to him that he might not have many chances to do so . 8 He was joined in his short and savage struggle with Godse by Raghunath Naik, the gardener at Birla House, who hit the assailant on the head with his khurpi , a garden trowel. Amarnath, an assistant sub-inspector who stood at a distance of about 2 metres from Gandhi when the shots were fired, rushed forward and took Godse into custody. 9
Godse was whisked away by the police. He was first kept in a room on the ground floor of Birla House and then shifted to the Tughlak Road police station, about 1.5 kilometres away, in central Delhi.
A reporter, who saw Godse soon after he was brought to the Tughlak Road police station, described him as very calm . Godse was handcuffed and sat on a wooden bench when the reporter saw him in a dark, unlighted lock-up-a 10-foot by 10-foot enclosure with cemented floor and concrete walls. The room s iron-barred gate opened into a veranda, where several armed guards were stationed to prevent any attempt to rescue the assassin. Godse was wearing a white shirt, blue pullover, grey trousers and khaki jacket. Blood was pouring down his forehead over the left side of his face. The police told the reporter that this was due to the blows which the spectators had heaped upon him; the rumour that the assassin had tried to shoot himself was baseless. 10
Godse got up from his seat when the reporter approached him. The journalist threw questions at him and Godse answered them all. He revealed his true name and the place he belonged to, but seemed sensitive about his age; he evidently didn t want the journalist to know that he was no longer a young man. According to the news report that was published on the front page of the Hindustan Times the next day, Godse revealed that he was twenty-five. But the journalist did not buy the lie. He noted in his dispatch: He gave his age as 25, but he looked considerably older . 11

The reporter was right in his observation-Godse was not twenty-five, but thirty-eight. There was something striking about this exchange between the two. Godse s attempt to conceal his real age fit in with the traits that had emerged in his childhood and developed deep roots in him. His craving for a virile image meant that he resented anyone making a note of the fact that he had passed his youth and was nearly middle-aged.
This desire of a masculine image had shaped the style and actions of his past life, and it seemed to be a prominent force even after he killed Gandhi. The artifice dominated Godse s thinking from his formative years.
Godse was born on 19 May 1910 in Baramati, a small town in Poona district of the Bombay Presidency. His father, Vinayakrao Godse, was a petty government official who worked in the postal department and his mother, Lakshmi, a devoted housewife. They belonged to the Brahmin community, an elite social group that is said by legend to have emerged from the brain of Lord Brahma, the mythical creator of the universe. Brahmins see themselves as the upholders of Hinduism, a religious system which rests on a belief in supernatural powers embodied in idols, stars, planets, rivers, trees, sacred animals, and divine men and women. It stresses on castes, that is, birth-based hierarchical arrangement of endogamous social groups. Theologically, Brahmins occupy the apex of Hinduism s social pyramid, enjoying a complex set of privileges and observing a baffling combination of restraints. Originally, they were, as per Hindu mythology, mendicants and philosophers living apart from the material world and its temptations, but through centuries they were transformed into a priestly class.
This was a society where social roles were rigid and preordained, and public and intellectual life was dominated by religious texts, rituals and caste identities. Superstitions and legends controlled their vitals so deeply and revealingly that by the time of Godse s birth, his parents-as also a significant section of Brahmins-remained ambivalent towards the changing social environment that resulted from the spread of modern scientific education and liberal tendencies in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India.
Godse was the fourth son in the family. Three older sons, born in 1901, 1904 and 1907, had all died in infancy. Only Mathura, a daughter born in 1898, the first offspring of Vinayakrao and Lakshmi, had survived. There was, therefore, a deep sense of anxiety in the family when Lakshmi gave birth to her fourth son. With some medical help, they might have worked themselves out of the difficult situation and the subsequent history of their family-and of India-might have turned out quite differently. But the world of Godse s forefathers, filled with superstitions, meant much to his parents, who saw in the terrifying deaths of their infant sons the role of a divine curse which allowed only their female child to remain alive.
So, when