The victim foresaw his impending end: “If I die by a madman’s bullet, I can die with a smile,” Mahatma Gandhi said comfortingly to confidants. Just two days later, on January 30, 1948, the time had come: three bullets hit the spiritual leader of the Indian independence movement, who, as personified pacifism, had brought the British Empire to its knees.
The assassin was Indian like Gandhi himself, Hindu like himself. This is precisely why Nathuram Godse and his co-conspirators wanted to punish him. Because as a Hindu he had brought misfortune to millions of other Hindus and because he was too tolerant of the followers of the other major religion on the Indian subcontinent, the Muslims.
Indeed, Gandhi, whose real name was Mohandas Karamchand and was born on October 2, 1869, the last of four children of the prime minister of the princely state of Porbandar on the Gujarat peninsula, preached tolerance and non-violence. He had studied law in London as a member of the Indian upper class and then started a career as a lawyer, first in his home country and then in South Africa. But even here he became a political activist, initially for the rights of the Indian minority in the British colony of South Africa.
In 1914 he returned to India and began his peaceful campaign for Indian independence. In the three decades that followed, he repeatedly achieved his goals – again and again using ritual fasting. Despite his deep religious convictions, Gandhi wanted a united, secular India – and not two states, a Hindu India and a Muslim Pakistan. But that’s exactly what happened in 1947.
Expulsions in both directions followed; a total of around 20 million people had to leave their homes. And there were riots against minorities, including mass murders; estimates of the number of victims vary between 200,000 and one million. Only in mid-January 1948 was Gandhi able to end anti-Muslim riots in India with five days of public starvation.
But in doing so he made mortal enemies of a group of particularly radical Hindu nationalists, above all Nathuram Godse (1910-1949), a member of the radical “All-India Hindu General Assembly”. Gandhi, he said at his trial, was a “violent pacifist” who brought unspeakable harm to India in the name of truth and non-violence.
“The accumulated provocations of 32 years, culminating in his last fast in favor of the Muslims, finally convinced me that Gandhi’s existence had to be ended as soon as possible,” Godse justified himself in court. Nevertheless, he received the maximum sentence and was executed on November 15, 1949.
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Gandhi himself would probably not have agreed with this verdict – at least that’s what two of his sons said. Because he was always a strict opponent of the death penalty. In any case, the assassination finally made the prophet of non-violence immortal. To this day, January 30 is considered one of the most important commemorations of the year in India, and around the world Gandhi is admired for his peaceful struggle.
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This article was first published in January 2021.
