Nathuram Godse
Nathuram Vinayak Godse (19 May 1910 – 15 November 1949) was a militant Hindu
nationalist activist from India, who is known for the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.
He shot Gandhi in the chest three times at point-blank
range on 30 January 1948 in New
Delhi. Born in Pune, Maharashtra, he had been a member of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Hindu
Mahasabha.
According to Vinayak Chaturvedi and Thomas
Hansen, Nathuram left RSS in the early 1940s to form a militant organization
Hindu Rashtra Dal. However,
Nathuram's brother Gopal Godse,
who was also a co-accused in the Gandhi assassination-- has asserted that
Nathuram continued to be a member of the RSS.
Nathuram resented Gandhi's
accommodating attitude to India'sMuslims and plotted the assassination with Narayan Apte and six others. After a trial that lasted over a year, Godse
was sentenced to death on 8 November 1949 and was hanged a week later.
Nathram Godse Last Speech
[On 8 November 1948,
Nathuram Godse (19 May 1910-15 November 1949) rose to make his statement in
court. Reading quietly from a typed manuscript, he sought to explain why he had
killed Gandhi. His thesis covered ninety-pages, and he was on his feet for five
hours. Godse's statement, excerpted below, should be read by citizens and
scholars in its entirely, for it provides an insight into his personality and
his understanding of the concept of Indian nationhood – Editor]
"Born in a
devotional Brahmin family, I instinctively came to revere Hindu religion, Hindu
history and Hindu culture. I had, therefore, been intensely proud of Hinduism
as a whole. As I grew up I developed a tendency to free thinking unfettered by
any superstitious allegiance to any isms, political or religious. That is why I
worked actively for the eradication of untouchability and the caste system
based on birth alone. I openly joined anti-caste movements and maintained that
all Hindus are of equal status as to rights, social and religious, and should
be considered high or low on merit alone and not through the accident of birth
in a particular caste or profession.
I used publicly to take
part in organized anti-caste dinners which thousands of Hindus, Brahmins,
Vaishyas, Kshatriyas, Chamars and B-----s participated. We broke the caste
rules and dined in the company of each other. I have read the speeches and
writings of Dadabhai Naoroji, Vivekanand, Gokhale, Tilak, along with the books
of ancient and modern history of India and some prominent countries like
England, France, America and Russia. Moreover I studied the tenets of socialism
and Marxism. But above all I studied very closely what Veer (brave) Savarkar
and Gandhiji had written and spoken, as to my mind these two ideologies have
contributed more to the moulding of the thought and action of the Indian people
during the last thirty years or so, than any other factor has done.
All this thinking and
reading led me to believe that it was my first duty to serve Hindudom and
Hindus both as a patriot and as a world citizen. To secure the freedom and to
safeguard the just interests of some thirty crores (three hundred million) of
Hindus would automatically constitute the freedom and well-being of all India,
one fifth of the human race. This conviction led me naturally to devote myself
to the Hindu Sanatanist ideology and programme, which alone, I came to believe,
could win and preserve the National Independence of Hindustan, my Motherland,
and enable her to render true service to humanity as well. Since the year 1920,
that is, after the demise of Lokmanya Tilak, Gandhi's influence in the Congress
first increased and then became supreme.
His activities for
public awakening were phenomenal in their intensity and were reinforced by the
slogan of truth and non-violence, which he paraded ostentatiously before the
country. No sensible or enlightened person could object to these slogans. In
fact there is nothing new or original in them. They are implicit in every
constitutional public movement. But it is nothing but a dream if you imagine
the bulk of mankind is, or can ever become, capable of scrupulous adherence to
these lofty principles in its normal life from day to day. In fact, honour,
duty and love of one's own kith and kin and country might often compel us to
disregard non-violence and to use force. I could never conceive that an armed
resistance to an aggression is unjust.
I would consider it a
religious and moral duty to resist and if possible, to overpower such an enemy
by use of force. (In the Ramayana) Rama killed Ravana in a tumultuous fight and
relieved Sita. (In the Mahabharata) Krishna killed Kansa to end his wickedness;
and Arjuna had to fight and slay quite a number of his friends and relations,
including the revered Bhishma, because the latter was on the side of the
aggressor. It is my firm belief that in dubbing Rama, Krishna and Arjuna as
guilty of violence, the Mahatma betrayed the total ignorance of the springs of
human action. In more recent history, it was the heroic fight put up by
Chhatrapati Shivaji that first checked and eventually destroyed the Muslim
tyranny in India. It was absolutely essential for Shivaji to overpower and kill
an aggressive Afzal Khan, failing which he would have lost his own life. In
condemning history's towering warriors like Shivaji, Rana Pratap and Guru
Govind Singh as misguided patriots, Gandhi has merely exposed his self-conceit.
He was, paradoxical, as
it may appear, a violent pacifist who brought untold calamities on the country
in the name of truth and non-violence, while Rana Pratap, Shivaji and the Guru
will remain enshrined in the hearts of their countrymen forever for the freedom
they brought to them. The accumulating provocation of thirty-two years,
culminating in his last pro-Muslim fast, at last goaded me to the conclusion
that the existence of Gandhi should be brought to an end immediately. Gandhi
had done very good work in South Africa to uphold the rights and well being of
the Indian community there.
But when he finally
returned to India, he developed a subjective mentality under which he alone was
to be the final judge of what was right or wrong. If the country wanted his
leadership, it had to accept his infallibility; if it did not, he would stand
aloof from the Congress and carry on in his own way. Against such an attitude
there can be no halfway house. Either Congress had to surrender its will to his
and had to be content with playing second fiddle to all his eccentricity,
whimsicality, metaphysics and primitive vision, or it had to carry on without
him. He alone was the judge of everyone and everything; he was the master brain
guiding the Civil Disobedience movement; no other could know the technique of
that movement. He alone knew when to begin it and when to withdraw it. The movement
might succeed or fail, but that could make no difference to the Mahatma's
infallibility. 'A Satyagrahi can never fail' was his formula for his own
infallibility and nobody except himself knew what a Satyagrahi is.
Thus the Mahatma became
the judge and the jury in his own case. These childish insanities and
obstinacies, coupled with a most severe austerity of life, ceaseless work and
lofty character made Gandhi formidable and irresistible. Many people thought
that his policies were irrational, but they had either to withdraw from the
Congress or place their intelligence at his feet to do with as he liked. In a
position of such absolute irresponsibility, Gandhi was guilty of blunder after
blunder, failure after failure, and disaster after disaster. Gandhi's
pro-Muslim policy is blatantly illustrated in his perverse attitude on the
question of the national language of India. It is quite obvious that Hindi has
the most prior claim to be accepted as the premier language.
In the beginning of his
career in India, Gandhi gave a great impetus to Hindi, but as he found that the
Muslims did not like it, he became a champion of what is called Hindustani.
Everybody in India knows that there is no language in India called Hindustani;
it has no grammar; it has no vocabulary. It is a mere dialect; it is spoken,
not written. It is a tongue and a crossbreed between Hindi and Urdu, and not
even the Mahatma's sophistry could make it popular. But in his desire to please
the Muslims he insisted that Hindustani alone should be the national language
of India. His blind followers, of course, supported him and the so-called
hybrid language began to be used. The charm and the purity of the Hindi
language were to be prostituted to please the Muslims. All his experiments were
at the expense of the Hindus.
From August 1946
onwards, the private armies of the Muslim League began a massacre of Hindus.
The then Viceroy, Lord Wavell, though distressed at what was happening, would
not use his powers under the Government of India Act of 1935 to prevent the
rape, murder and arson. The Hindu blood began to flow from Bengal to Karachi
with little retaliation by the Hindus. The Interim Government formed in
September was sabotaged by its Muslim League members right from its inception,
but the more they became disloyal and treasonable to the government of which
they were a part, the greater was Gandhi's infatuation for them.
Lord Wavell had to
resign as he could not bring about a settlement and was succeeded by Lord
Mountbatten. King Stork followed King Log. The Congress, which had boasted of
its nationalism and secularism, secretly accepted Pakistan literally at the
point of the bayonet and abjectly surrendered to Jinnah. India was vivisected
and one-third of the Indian Territory became foreign land to us from 15 August
1947. Lord Mountbatten came to be described in the Congress circles as the
greatest Viceroy and Governor-General this country ever had.
The official date for
the handing over of power was fixed for June 30, 1948, but Mountbatten with his
ruthless surgery gave us a gift of vivisected India ten months in advance. This
is what Gandhi had achieved after thirty years of undisputed dictatorship and
this is what the Congress party calls 'freedom' and 'peaceful transfer of
power'. The Hindu-Muslim unity bubble was finally burst and a theocratic state
was established with the consent of Nehru and his crowd and they have called it
'freedom won by them with sacrifice' - whose sacrifice? When top leaders of
Congress, with the consent of Gandhi, divided and tore the country - which we
considered a deity of worship - my mind was filled with direful anger.
One of the conditions
imposed by Gandhi for his breaking of the fast related to the mosques in Delhi
occupied by the Hindu refugees. But when Hindus in Pakistan were subjected to
violent attacks he did not so much as utter a single word to protest and
censure the Pakistan Government or the Muslims concerned. Gandhi was shrewd
enough to know that while undertaking a fast unto death, had he imposed some
conditions on the Muslims in Pakistan, here would have been found hardly any
Muslims who could have shown some grief if the fast had ended in his death. It
was for this reason that he purposely avoided imposing any conditions on the
Muslims.
He was fully aware from
past experience that Jinnah was not at all perturbed or influenced by his fast
and the Muslim League hardly attached any value to the inner voice of Gandhi.
Gandhi is being referred to as the Father of the Nation. But if that is so, he
has failed in his paternal duty in as much he has acted very treacherously to
the nation by his consenting to the partitioning of it. I stoutly maintain that
Gandhi has failed in his duty. He has proved to be the Father of Pakistan. His
inner-voice, his spiritual power, his doctrine of non-violence of which so much
is made of, all crumbled against Jinnah's iron will and proved to be powerless.
Briefly speaking, I thought
to myself and foresaw that I shall be totally ruined, and the only thing I
could expect from the people would be nothing but hatred and that I shall have
lost all my honour, even more valuable than my life, if I were to kill
Gandhiji. But at the same time I thought that the Indian politics in the
absence of Gandhiji would surely be practical, able to retaliate and would be
powerful with the armed forces. No doubt, my own future would be totally
ruined, but the nation would be saved from the inroads of Pakistan. People may
even call me or dub me as devoid of any sense or foolish, but the nation would
be free to follow the course founded on the reason, which I consider necessary
for sound nation-building.
After having fully
considered the question, I took the final decision in the matter, but I did not
speak about it to anyone whatsoever. I took courage in both my hands and I did
fire the shots at Gandhiji on 30th January 1948, on the prayer-grounds in Birla
House. I do say that my shots were fired at the person whose policy and action
had brought rack and ruin and destruction to millions of Hindus. There was no
legal machinery by which such an offender could be brought to book and for this
reason I fired those fatal shots. I bear no ill will towards anyone
individually, but I do say that I had no respect for the present government
owing to their policy, which was unfairly favourable towards the Muslims. But
at the same time I could clearly see that the policy was entirely due to the
presence of Gandhi.
I have to say with
great regret that Prime Minister Nehru quite forgets that his preaching and
deeds are at times at variance with each other when he talks about India as a
secular state in season and out of season, because it is significant to note
that Nehru has played a leading role in the theocratic state of Pakistan, and
his job was made easier by Gandhi's persistent policy of appeasement towards
the Muslims. I now stand before the court to accept the full share of my
responsibility for what I have done and the judge would, of course, pass
against me such orders of sentence as may be considered proper. But I would
like to add that I do not desire any mercy to be shown to me, nor do I wish
that anyone should beg for mercy on my behalf.
My confidence about the
moral side of my action has not been shaken even by the criticism levelled
against it on all sides. I have no doubt that honest writers of history will
weigh my act and find the true value thereof someday in future."
Nathuram Godse was hanged a year later, on 15
November 1949; as per his last wishes, his family and followers have preserved
his ashes for immersion in the Indus River of a re-united India.
