Violent enemies killed Gandhi, the ‘great soul’ of peace
TO
westerners he was a smiling, bespectacled saint, preaching nonviolent
civil disobedience to free India from the shackles of the British
Empire.
As
he charmed workers at British cotton mills in the 1930s, at home in
India Mohandas Gandhi was deemed the enemy of millions of untouchables,
forever designated as sanitation collectors for higher caste Hindus.
But
in the turbulence of India’s independence struggles, it was another
political foe who fired the three bullets that killed Gandhi on January
30, 1948, as he walked to a raised lawn at Birla House in New Delhi, to
conduct his daily multi-faith prayer meeting.
Since
June 1934, there had been five attempts to kill Gandhi, including a
grenade attack on January 20, 1948 by Hindu Madanlal Pahwa: 20 members
of his family had been massacred as they fled West Pakistan.
Gandhi’s
accused assassin was Nathuram Godse, from the marginal Hindu Mahasabha
party, formed in 1914 to protect Hindu rights against the All India
Muslim League, and oppose the British India government’s creation of a
separate Muslim electorate. Although an occasional Muslim League ally,
the Mahasabha party considered Muslims in India a greater enemy to
Hindus than the British, and opposed Gandhi’s policy of civil
disobedience to win independence.
Godse,
a journalist who had been jailed for political crimes, was arrested
with publisher Narayan Apte and six accused collaborators. At his murder
trial at Delhi’s Red Fort in May 1948, Godse blamed Gandhi “for the
sufferings of Partition” after Indian independence in August 1947 and
accused him of “complacency towards Muslims”. Godse, implicated in three
earlier attempts on Gandhi’s life, said Gandhi had appeased Muslims to
the degree “that my blood boiled and I could tolerate him no longer … my
shots were fired at the person whose policy and action had brought
destruction, rack and ruin to millions of Hindus”.
Godse
and his collaborators had plotted the assassination since January 13,
1948, when Gandhi announced his “fast-unto-death” to pressure the Indian
government to release payments to Pakistan, withheld because Pakistan
was at war with India in Kashmir. Gandhi opposed freezing the payment.
When the Indian government yielded to pressure from Gandhi, Godse and
his collaborators decided Gandhi was controlling power in India.
Gandhi
had moved to New Delhi in 1946, staying with untouchables, identified
also as scheduled caste, scavengers and dalits, at Balmiki Temple in
northern New Delhi until it was requisitioned for Hindu refugees from
Pakistan in September 1947. Then trying to stem violent riots as
millions of Hindus and Muslims crossed new borders, he moved to a
mansion owned by Ghanshyam Das Birla, a wealthy manufacturer, in central
Delhi.
Gandhi,
who weighed in at 49.6kg on the morning of his death, was late for his
5pm prayer meeting as he crossed the lawn at Birla House with distant
cousin Manu Gandhi, called Manuben, and Abha Chatterjee, a girl adopted
by the Gandhis who would later marry Gandhi’s great nephew, Kanu Gandhi.
Manuben
wrote that “A stout young man in Khaki dress (Godse), pushed his way
through the crowd, bent over and with his hands folded”. She thought he
wanted to touch Gandhi’s feet, and pushed him away saying, “Bapu is
already 10 minutes late, why do you embarrass him”. She said Godse
pushed her aside so forcibly that she lost her balance and dropped a
rosary and notebook. As she bent to pick them up, she heard three shots
and saw smoke everywhere. Gandhi’s hands were folded, and Abhaben had
also fallen down, and Gandhi was across her lap. It took about 10
minutes to carry Gandhi, who was bleeding profusely, back to the house,
where he died at about 5.30pm.
Newspapers
reported that Godse was seized by Herbert Reiner Jr, then 32 and a new
vice-consul at the US embassy in Delhi. He had joined a small crowd at
Birla House at 4.45pm and reportedly felt security measures were
inadequate. Other reports said Godse had surrendered, and others that he
had tried to flee into the crowd.
At
least two million people joined the 8km long funeral procession that
took five hours to move from Birla House to Raj Ghat, where Gandhi was
cremated in a funeral pyre. But in 1955, political opponent Bhimrao
Ambedkar said Gandhi did not truly “deserve” the title of Mahatma, or
great soul.
The
14th child of a low class Dalit, Ambedkar described Gandhi, born into a
ruling caste, as both a great man, and “the greatest enemy the
untouchables have ever had in India”.
In
1932 Gandhi blocked Ambedkar’s attempt to create a dalit parliament to
improve the lot of more than 60 million Indians born to scheduled
castes. Ambedkar wanted an immediate ban on scavenging; Gandhi said
upper caste Hindus should stop discrimination against lower castes, who
should accept the work of their caste, arguing “a scavenger’s profession
is in no way inferior to a clergyman’s”.
