Mahatma's Blunders by Anup Sardesai

 On 30^th January 1948, at 5.17pm IST, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, popularly known as Mahatma Gandhi or Gandhiji, was brutally shot dead as he was walking towards his prayer ground sat the Birla House, Delhi. His assassin, Nathuram Vinayak Godse, a resident of Poona, was arrested at the scene of the crime and sentenced to death by hanging after a trial that lasted for over a year.

During the course of the trial, Nathuram Godse presented his statement in the Special Trial Court at the Red Fort, New Delhi on 8^th November 1948 where he mentioned a number of blunders committed by Gandhiji which compelled him to take this extreme step. However, this statement was banned by the Government of India the very next day after it was read with the pretext that it contained distorted facts which demeaned the Mahatma.

Though the Government banned the statement, it needed substantial evidence to justify its actions. Thus, they came up with a mythical ‘Hindu Extremism’ theory saying that Gandhiji’s murder was a result of religious fanaticism. This gave the Government sufficient grounds to ban this statement under Section 153 which gave the Government powers to restrict information from reaching the public citing a threat to communal harmony.

After his release from prison in 1964, Nathuram Godse’s brother Gopal Godse, a fellow conspirator in the assassination of Gandhiji approached the courts seeking the lifting of the ban on publishing the statement.  In 1968, Gopal Godse, won a hard fought case in the Bombay High Court in which he managed to get the ban lifted on the publishing of this statement. In a landmark 217-page judgement delivered in 1968, the Bombay High Court said, ‘We think that the claim of the publisher that 'Gandhi's assassination is now a matter of history' ... is fairly justified’

But, even after the ban was lifted, the Government threatened publishers of imprisonment under Section 153 if they dared to publish the statement. Thus, no publisher with a reputation was willing to publish it due to the fear of a backlash from the Congress which was then ruling the country. The ban on this statement for almost 50 years was one of the biggest abuses of ‘Freedom of Expression’ this country has ever seen.

Finally, in 1983, after the Bombay High Court, in another case, ruled that Section 153 cannot be misused against people carrying historical research, the first copy of this statement came into the public domain. In 1992, the statement was published in the form of a booklet which bore the name ‘Why I assassinated Gandhi’. Since then, the book has appeared in several Indian languages.

Although much of this statement focuses on the murder itself, there are certain points made by Nathuram Godse where he has criticized Gandhiji’s role in India’s freedom movement. In his lengthy statement, Godse has methodically surveyed the history of India’s freedom movement from 1920 to 1948 and has highlighted a number of misconceived policies of Gandhiji that led to an unmitigated disaster which ruined the lives of over 20 million innocent people on both sides of the border.

Yet, for over six decades, this statement has been mocked by Gandhi protagonists as a bunch of lies. This country, which calls itself the largest democracy in the world and boasts of ‘Freedom of Expression’ for its citizens, has resorted to a total misuse of state machinery to ban every single book carrying Nathuram Godse’s side of the story. Even, people expressing dissenting views on the Mahatma’s ideology have been vilified.

The reasons for such actions can be attributed to a section of the Indian political class who have used the country’s history as a propaganda tool and willfully misrepresented it to glorify their own leaders. For ages, historical writings for political motives have been a habitual tradition. Unfortunately, post independent Indian historical writing has been degraded to the nadir of crass, self-serving political activism and a determination by these Gandhi protagonists to censor defiant views challenging their Mahatma’s ideology.

In his book ‘Let’s Kill Gandhi’, (Foreword pg.xx) Gandhiji’s great grandson, Tushar Gandhi states ‘It is almost sixty years since Gandhi’s murder, yet many facts remain unknown. The partition of India and the slaughter of humanity in its aftermath are still volatile and sensitive issues. The Hindu extremists have very successfully spread their version of Gandhi’s role in partition and its aftermath. The Gandhians and Congressmen, by silence on the part of the former and complacence on the part of the latter, have reinforced the lies of the Godseites’.

Thus, it is evident that our political class is still not prepared to admit that a person of Gandhiji’s stature can commit any mistakes. The refusal of the Indian political class to acknowledge the blunders committed by the Mahatma and understand the political rationale behind the Mahatma’s assassination have only resulted in a number of fictional stories being cooked up and narrated as the gospel truth. Some people have derived their own theory of an alleged hand of Hindu extremist groups behind the murder of Gandhiji because they opposed his principles of Hindu-Muslim unity.

Although, several questions have been raised over the authenticity of such allegations, the Indian government has never allowed anyone to uncover the real truth behind the murder of Gandhiji as it could lead to unearthing of new facts and analysis which could be a big embarrassment to the image of the Mahatma.

As a result, for over sixty years, these mythical stories, based on unfound theories, have been imposed upon the people of India by coercion in order to glorify the Mahatma and make him look as a mere victim of Godse’s religious fanaticism . In the process, they have succeeded in only glorifying Nathuram Godse as a martyr who laid down his life for the Hindu cause and branding Gandhiji as a Hindu hater and Muslim lover.

Another reason for the ever increasing followership of Nathuram Godse is a barrage of unproven slandering carried out against him by a coterie of Left leaning historians which has resulted in more and more people sympathizing with him.

In their book ‘Freedom at Midnight’, authors larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre have stated ‘A long time opium user, he was also a homo-sexual, but a few people knew about it……he had, so it is believed, only one sexual experience, with his political mentor, Veer Savarkar’.

The authors Collins and Lapierre claimed that Gopal Godse had given them this information though they have not mentioned its source in their book. Gopal Godse not only denied having told the authors anything like that but, sent a notice to the writers following which they gave an undertaking to Gopal Godse’s lawyer that the passage would not be included in future editions of the book.

Though Collins and Lapierre have stood by their word, other authors have used this passage as a source in their own books. In his book ‘Nehru’, noted columnist M.J. Akbar has described the Mahatma’s assassin as ‘Nathuram Godse, thirty-seven, homosexual, fanatic, ascetic…’

Similarly, other authors like Ashish Nandy have also endorsed Collins and Lapierre’s claims. Thus, with this kind of cheap denigration, these rumour mongers have only succeeded in creating a strong following for Godse especially among the new generation of Indians.

At a time when this country is going through chaotic times and when its political class has lost the confidence of the masses, it definitely does not need a Hindu Extremist as a source of inspiration for its young generation.

Hence, this book ‘Mahatma’s Blunders’ intends to put the facts straight. By meticulously studying Nathuram Godse’s statement and comparing it with facts gleaned from Indian history and books on Indian Freedom Struggle, the author makes a sincere effort to derive the logic behind Godse’s criticism of Gandhiji’s political strategies and try to answer a more fundamental question, why did Nathuram Godse kill Mahatma Gandhi?

This book ‘Mahatma’s Blunders’ covers the entire life span of Gandhiji’s political career, from his early days in South Africa to his contribution to India’s Freedom Struggle, right up to his last days.

Nathuram Godse’s statement is a part of the record of the Gandhi murder case, which can be found in Printed Volume II, Criminal Appeals No. 66 to 72 of the 1949 Punjab High Court (then at) Simla.

The numeration of paragraphs in Godse’s statement is as per the original published by Gopal Godse in his book ‘Why I assassinated Gandhi’. Certain paragraphs which are non-relevant to the subject have not been reproduced.