Short answers, pulled from the story.
Nathuram Godse was an Indian Hindu nationalist and political activist who shot Gandhi three times at a prayer meeting in Birla House, New Delhi, on the 30th of January 1948. He claimed Gandhi had favoured the political demands of Muslims during the 1947 partition of India. Godse was a member of the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and a devoted follower of Hindutva ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.
Godse made two earlier attempts before the fatal shooting in 1948. In May 1944, he led a group of fifteen to twenty men who tried to attack Gandhi with a knife at Panchgani but were blocked by the crowd. In September 1944, he was arrested with a dagger while trying to block Gandhi's passage from Sevagram to Mumbai. Both times he was released because Gandhi declined to press charges.
Herbert Reiner Jr., a 32-year-old vice-consul at the new American embassy in Delhi, was the first to act. He was attending the prayer meeting when the shots were fired and grabbed Godse by the shoulders, spinning him into the arms of military personnel, before holding him by the neck until police arrived.
Godse was hanged at Ambala Central Jail on the 15th of November 1949. He had been sentenced to death on the 8th of November 1949 by the Punjab High Court at Peterhoff, Shimla, after a trial lasting more than a year. Pleas for clemency from Gandhi's sons Manilal and Ramdas Gandhi were rejected by Prime Minister Nehru, Deputy Prime Minister Patel, and Governor-General Chakravarti Rajagopalachari.
Evidence strongly indicates he was. Although Godse publicly claimed to have left the RSS in 1946, his own post-assassination deposition in Marathi stated "I remained active in Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh." A 2020 investigation by The Caravan found that RSS meeting records listed him as a member long after his claimed resignation, and his brother Gopal Godse stated that all the Godse brothers were RSS members at the time of the assassination.
Following the BJP's rise to power in 2014, the Hindu Mahasabha launched efforts to rehabilitate Godse as a patriot. It requested Prime Minister Narendra Modi to install a bust of Godse, produced a documentary called Desh Bhakt Nathuram Godse, and sought to designate the 30th of January as Shaurya Diwas. The city of Meerut was proposed for renaming in his honour, though a district magistrate ruled it out.