Books I Read (and still reading) in 2020 - Part 1 (Why I Killed Gandhi)

 Hi folks! I am back with my blog again! A very dramatic year 2020 has been. The Covid-19 pandemic had altered the way we live. No handshakes, no close proximity, face masked always - it is known as the New Normal. When the pandemic first broke out, almost the whole world went into lock down. Borders closed, economies shut down, people lost their income and suddenly business continuity planning became a sought after competency. 

In the gloom, something good did happen - people found time at hand. Families started connecting, people pursued long awaited personal projects and some, like me, read books. I have a habit - I buy kindle books, make a mental note to read someday, but that someday took a pandemic to realise. So, since I had so much time at hand I started reading one by one the books that I had bought. Here is the first book that I read at as the year unfolded. A gentle reminder - the contents cited were from the book; my comments are at the end of the post.   

Why I Killed Gandhi by Nathuram Vinayak Godse

Kindle books go by location. This book had 107 locations, not pages. A very short book which documented why Nathuram Vinayak Godse pulled that gun on Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi or Mahatma Gandhi, on that fateful day on January 30 1948. His trial began on 27th May 1948 and ended on 10th February 1949 when he was sentenced to death.

One statement by one of the judges, G D Khosla who wrote later, `I have, however, no doubt that had the audience of the day been constituted into a jury and entrusted with the task of deciding Godse's appeal, they would have brought a verdict of  `not guilty' by an overwhelming majority'.

That was a mind tickler - why would a judge who had presided over the case write such?

Godse claimed that he was born in a devotional Brahmin family which saw him grow up free thinking, regardless. He claimed that he worked very hard to eradicate untouchability and caste system which was based on birth alone. He also wrote that he studied closely the writings of Veer Savarkar and Gandhiji which he believed moulded the thoughts and actions of the Indian people at large. He said that he believed that Hindi Sanghtanist ideology and programme alone could preserve the national independence of India.

In the very page he also wrote: I could never conceive that an armed resistance to an aggression is unjust. He cited the killing of Raavan by Shri Rama in Ramayan. He went further to cite the examples of Chhatrapati Shivaji, Rana Pratap and Guru Gobind Singh. In comparison to these partriots, Godse had labelled Gandhiji as a violent pacifist who brought untold calamities in the country in the name of truth and non-violence. 

Godse said that the accumulative provocation from Gandhiji's ahimsa which culminated in his last pro-Muslim fast drove him to the conclusion that the Mahatma's existence should be brought to an end immediately. However, Godse wrote an interesting comparison where he said `Gandhi had done very good 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...thus, the Mahatma became the judge and jury in his own cause'.

It further irked Godse that while at one time the Mahatma had given great impetus to Hindi at the beginning of his career, eventually Hindustani was born - a cross breed between Hindi and Urdu, which he claimed had no grammar and vocabulary. These, he said, were among the experiments by Gandhiji which were done at the expense of the Hindus.

Beginning August 1946, Godse said there were massacres of Hindus from Bengal to Karachi. The Viceroys at that time - Lord Wavell and Lord Mountbatten, he claimed could not do anything to stop those massacres, neither could the Congress. Gandhiji's fast to death was purportedly because Hindu refugees occupied mosques in Delhi but apparently he did not utter a word on the massacre of Hindus in Pakistan. In Godse's mind, Gandhiji was more of Father of Pakistan than Father of the Nation. He knew he would lose all his honour if he were to kill the Mahatma but he believed that `...Indian politics in the absence of Gandhiji would surely be proved practical, able to retaliate and would be powerful with armed forces...the nation would be free to follow the course founded on the reason which I consider to be necessary for sound nation-building'. 

He ended his book with the confidence that `...honest writers of history will weigh my act and find the true value thereof some day in the future'.

I chanced upon the book when I browsed the Amazon Kindle bookstore; I didn't make any conscious effort to review Godse's book, so probably I am not one of those `honest writers' Godse had hoped would see his side of the justice. Decades ago, during one of my mother tongue classes, Tamil, the teacher had said the same thing - the best thing that happened was Mahatma Gandhi was killed, because his ahimsa made us Indians `impotent'. That statement shocked all of us in the class at that time but perhaps, there were others who believed that `an armed resistance to an aggression is not unjust'. The teacher went on to say that because of the believe in ahimsa, the Indian diaspora takes time to speak up for its rights - the wait and see attitude, he said, ruined opportunities for the subsequent generations. While from my perspective arguments about rights are something that I steer away from, however, I remember a saying that my late mother had used time and again - Even if you end up in a place where they eat snakes, make sure you get the mid portion (obviously,which would be meatier). In my mind, that is the armed resistance to aggression that the Indian diaspora seemed to have lost as a global community. However, in the recent decade we saw the likes of Satya Nadella, Indira Nooyi and Kamala Harris (though she is more Black American than Indian) emerge among the cadre of known global leaders.

Thus, when it comes to living life, I agree with Godse - when one needs to fight for one's own fate, putting up a good fight against all challenges in not unjust. The fight may not be accepted by all but the outcome would affect the future of generations to come. Thus, instead of waiting for change to arrive, it is essential that we ourselves become the change. I believe that was what Godse had in mind on that day 30th January 1948 when he pulled the trigger. He had wanted to become the change.