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February 02, 2023

After Gandhi's Assassination, Nehru Saw the Hindu Right as a Threat to the Indian State | Mridula Mukherjee

 The Wire - 30/Jan/2023

This year on January 30 will be exactly 75 years to Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination at the hands of those against his message of non-violence and fierce defence of a syncretic India. In a series of articles and videos, The Wire takes stock of Gandhi’s murder, and delves deeper into the forces and ideas behind independent India’s first act of terror. Recent years have seen another attempt to kill Gandhi, his ideas, spirit and message. We hope to help unpack where India stands today and its future, through the lens of how the Father of the Nation’s legacy is being treated.


In little over six months after the tragedy of the Partition of India, on January 30, 1948, another tragedy visited the fledgling state. If Partition could largely be ascribed to Muslim communalism, aided by colonialism, then Hindu communalism bears the responsibility for the assassination of the “greatest living Hindu”. In Nehru’s words

:

“Communalism resulted not only in the division of the country, which inflicted a deep wound in the heart of the people which will take a long time to heal if it ever heals but also assassination of the Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi.”

Gandhi’s assassination was a premeditated act. In November 1947, Karyanand Sharma, the CPI kisan leader from Bihar, had warned that the demand for a Hindu Raj “was very bad and behind it there was a conspiracy to murder Gandhiji  and Panditji”

. Gandhi himself understood the true nature of the abortive attempt that was made on his life on January 20, 1948. When a co-worker  wondered if the  bomb blast was accidental, he replied

: “The fool; don’t you see, there is a terrible and widespread conspiracy behind it?”

In his presidential address to the Hindu Mahasabha in 1937

, V.D. Savarkar, the creator of the concept of Hindutva, the first to propound the two-nation theory, and the organiser of the conspiracy to murder the Mahatma, declared: “India cannot be assumed today to be an unitarian and homogenous nation,  but on the contrary there are two nations in  the main, Hindus and Muslims, in India.” He refers to “centuries of a cultural, religious and national antagonism between the Hindus and the Moslems”. The title of the section in which the above statements are made is, ‘As it is there are two antagonistic nations living side by side in India.’ India is not a nation but it is the name of the state in which these two nations exist.

On August 15, 1947, two nation-states were born. One of them, Pakistan, could be said to conform to Savarkar’s definition of nation, but the one to which he belonged, India, was stubbornly refusing to fall in line. The biggest obstacle, it seemed, was the Mahatma himself. He had to be removed. With him alive, neither Hindu rashtra nor Akhand Bharat could become a reality.


There is consensus that it was an extreme wing of the Hindu Mahasabha led by Savarkar that was behind Gandhi’s murder

. In January 1948, when Gandhi was assassinated, Savarkar was arrested as the mastermind behind the conspiracy. He was eventually exonerated in the Gandhi murder trial for lack of evidence to corroborate the testimony of the approver, a technical point of criminal law. Sardar Patel, being a fine criminal lawyer, was personally convinced of Savarkar’s guilt, otherwise he would not have agreed to put him up for trial. He told Jawaharlal Nehru in unambiguous terms

:

“It was a fanatical wing of the Hindu Mahasabha directly under Savarkar that [hatched] the conspiracy and saw it through.”

When the Commission of Inquiry set up in 1965 under Justice Jiwan Lal Kapoor, a former judge of the Supreme Court of India, gave its report, it came to the following conclusion

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