Gandhi And His Killers

 Nalini Taneja

IT tells something about the crisis of our nationhood that even on Gandhi Jayanti, this year, one saw more references to Savarkar than Gandhi in the national and regional newspapers. In the days preceding Gandhi’s birthday, Gandhi’s killers occupied more space in newspapers and popular magazines than Gandhi was given, if one discounts the routine advertisements. There have been letters and write ups defending and eulogising Savarkar, who was involved in Gandhi’s murder. Now there is evidence that show Savarkar’s links with Nathuram Godse, the one who did the actual shooting.

What is more, people, and the political leadership in this country, have not only allowed this to happen, they have let it pass by without comment. Some Congressmen are now willing to vouch that Savarkar was a “patriot”, even if his ideology and vision for India are not desirable. It is a sad realisation, and one that needs some reflection.

For years now one has noticed that there is little about Gandhi in the popular media apart from a few official advertisements timed for Gandhi Jayanti; and most people have become used to such tokenness. It is part of the general decline in political culture and of the distance the nation has travelled from the first heady days of independence. Few people from that generation survive today, and the sacrifices for freedom are hardly a part of popular consciousness. Freedom is taken for granted and nationhood for the vocal middle class means essentially fulfillment of goals of consumerism. Yet what has happened this year is unprecedented. We are today debating and trying to find ‘evidence’ for something that was publicly recognised, and evoked mass repulsion in the years after independence and Gandhi’s murder.

SAVARKAR’S IDEOLOGY

It is a matter of legal and historical record that Savarkar was part of the conspiracy to murder Gandhi and that he stood firmly opposed to the idea of a secular-composite nationhood. All accounts of the aftermath of Gandhi’s murder, emanating from the RSS as much as from the secular publications, testify to the role of Savarkar in Gandhi’s murder. His ideas of Hindus and Muslims as constituting separate nations and of India as a potential Hindu rashtra are also freely circulated. The point to ponder over is: why is all this not a part of mass consciousness today? 

The government of the newly independent India was forced to ban the RSS because of the widespread public grief and anger that Gandhi’s murder evoked among all sections of the Indian people. Prior to his murder there was tremendous response to his last hunger strike undertaken to bring some sanity into political life. In many places communal killings actually stopped with Gandhi’s appeal for peace. Gandhi himself evolved in his thinking during the turmoil of independence and partition to emphasise on separation of state and religion, and a secular polity that went beyond religious harmony between the two communities. It is not for nothing that the right wing RSS saw in him their greatest enemy. He was one force within the nationalist leadership firmly opposed to partition on religious grounds and religion as basis for nationhood, despite his roots in religion as basis of individual and social ethics.

LEFT ALTERNATIVE

The Communists won more seats in the first parliament than any other political formation barring the Congress, and Left mass organisations greatly inspired the youth. There was a widespread desire to achieve the goals of freedom for the majority of the Indian people, and a Left alternative seemed viable and desirable. During the sixties and seventies it was still normal to publicly point towards the compromises made by Gandhi with the bourgeois leadership, to criticise him bitterly for his failure to raise the issue of Bhagat Singh during the Gandhi-Irwin pact, to publicly disown Chandra Singh Garhwali, and for his parochial views in the Hind Swaraj . The criticism of Gandhi was from the Left perspective, and it was taken seriously—far more seriously than the RSS calumny against him.

In the years to follow this great political advantage was allowed to erode. The leadership of secular India failed to keep alive the spirit of the popular struggles of the national-liberation struggle. It failed to take seriously the RSS until it began to impinge on parliamentary politics and win parliamentary seats. It failed to carry on the relentless propaganda against these dangerous divisive forces, whose version of nationhood and its history continued to permeate the cultural institutions and dominate the educational system outside the small circle of NCERT. It is the Hindutva forces that gained from the struggles against the emergency, despite the secret overtures of the RSS leadership to Mrs Gandhi, and it is they who gained most from the Janta party post-emergency experiment riding piggy back on the fierce popular opposition to the Emergency, and taking advantage of the political activism and defense of civil rights during those years. Media, educational institutions, the administration and police forces were infiltrated by their cadres, and the secular leadership still did not recognise the danger signs. The parallel resurgence of middle caste based parties after the green revolution could not meet this danger, sharing as they did, most of the parochial prerogatives of the communal forces, and the vocal middle classes were already setting their sights on the anticipated consumer gains from new economic policies. We lost a lot during those years, far more than we realised then.

GLORIFYING THE KILLERS

Even as the communal forces try to appropriate Gandhi’s legacy, assassin Nathuram Godse’s admirers in Maharashtra and Gujarat continue their campaign to vilify Gandhi and glorify the villain. The play, Mee Nathuram Boltoye (I am Nathuram Godse speaking), by Pradip Dalvi, which had earlier been banned in Maharashtra, was taken out of cold storage in 1995 after the Shiv Sena-BJP coalition came to power. While it still caused uproar in Maharastra, in Gujarat it completed over 60 shows, running to packed houses. This is a state that has spawned over 2,000 institutions in Gandhi’s name. A senior Gandhian and Gujarati writer, Manubhai Pancholi, conceded: “We are ashamed that we could not even protest and put the true facts before the people.” (Quoted in Communalism Combat, October 2000). It was the same during the 2002 genocide of the Muslims in Gujarat. The legacy of Gandhi is weakest in Gujarat, for many reasons, starting the rebuilding of the Somnath temple (with Patel’s cooperation) in the years immediately after independence. If the Hindutva texts and the RSS shakhas give their own version of our history and nationhood, excluding the role of the working people and of minorities, women and dalits, and vilify Communists and leaders like Gandhi and Nehru, we have been guilty of not keeping alive the role of the right wing Hindutva communal forces in our political propaganda till the BJP became a force to reckon with in parliament. Therefore it is part of popular belief today that Jinnah was no good, he caused partition, and is projected as villain, but anti-national elements like Godse and Savarkar still vie for space in the pantheon of nationalist leadership. The Congress, in all this, was not committed  to idea of projecting a secular heritage. It preferred ultimately to share a common cultural space with the communal forces, than to stand by its own resolutions of the national liberation days.   

LOST OPPORTUNITY

Today we are faced with a serious political and economic offensive. In the bargain, we have lost an opportunity to talk about Gandhi as we would like to—as democrats and from the perspective of the working people of this country. The ascendancy of the Hindutva right wing politics since the 1980s has robbed us of the right to really evaluate and critically comment on Gandhi’s role in our national life.

One remembers that today the Left has more members in Parliament than at any time since the first national elections after independence; it constitutes the second largest political bloc as then. But there is a sea change in the political and social ethos. The Left is not as strong a force as it should have been, despite the tremendous growth in our mass organisations and the political bases in West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura.  From being the leaders in the early 50s of campaigns voicing the betrayal of workers and peasants by the nationalist bourgeois leadership and the limitations of the Constitution of the new Republic, the Left is now the best guarantee for the defense of this same Constitution and of bourgeois democracy in the country. 

Savarkar’s photo in the Parliament alongside Gandhi’s is a reflection of this political juncture in the history of our nationhood, as is the recurrence of a debate that should have been closed long ago because there are no two sides on the matter. Savarkar is no patriot, while Gandhi died for the unity of this country.