Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi

• 1. Introduction

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  Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated on the 30th of January 1948, at the age of 78, in the garden compound of Birla House in central New Delhi. He had been walking to his evening prayer meeting, running about ten minutes late, leaning on the arms of two young women as he climbed the steps to the raised lawn. A man stepped out of the crowd. Three shots were fired at point-blank range. Gandhi fell.

  The man who pulled the trigger was Nathuram Godse, a right-wing Hindu nationalist from Pune with a history of ties to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and membership in the Hindu Mahasabha. He did not run. He did not deny what he had done. And what followed, in the trial, the courtroom, and the shocked capitals of the world, would shape India's identity as a new nation in ways that no one had planned.

  How did a man who had survived previous attacks, who had refused police protection on principle, come to be killed in a garden by someone he had personally declined to prosecute years before? And what did the world lose, and what did India's politics gain, in the hours and days after the shots rang out?

• 2. A History of Attempts

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  In May 1944, Nathuram Godse led a group of fifteen to twenty young men who rushed at Gandhi during a prayer meeting at Panchgani, intending to attack him with a knife. The crowd stopped them from reaching Gandhi. Because Gandhi refused to press criminal charges, Godse was released.

  Four months later, in September 1944, Godse led another group to block Gandhi's passage from Sevagram to Mumbai. This time Godse was arrested carrying a dagger and made threats to kill Gandhi openly. He was released again for the same reason.

  Godse was not a stranger to confrontation with authority. He had joined a protest march in 1938 in Hyderabad against Osman Ali Khan, the Muslim ruler of the princely Deccan dominion, was arrested for political crimes, and served a prison sentence. After his release he worked as a journalist, reporting on the suffering of Hindu refugees fleeing Pakistan and documenting the religious riots that erupted repeatedly during the 1940s.

  An earlier, separate attempt on Gandhi's life had taken place on the 25th of June 1934 in Pune. Gandhi was travelling with his wife Kasturba in a motorcade of two cars to deliver a speech at Corporation Auditorium. Their car was delayed, and the first car reached the auditorium ahead of them. A bomb thrown at that first car exploded, seriously injuring the Chief Officer of the Pune Municipal Corporation, two policemen, and seven others. Gandhi's secretary Pyarelal Nayyar later concluded the attempt failed because of poor planning and coordination.

• 3. The Decision to Kill

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  On the 13th of January 1948, Gandhi began a fast-unto-death to pressure the Indian government into releasing a frozen payment to Pakistan. India and Pakistan were already at war over Kashmir. Nehru had withheld the funds as a wartime measure. Gandhi's fast forced a reversal. To Godse and his colleagues, this was the final evidence that Gandhi was not a moral leader but a political force bending the Indian government to his will, in ways they believed harmed India.

  On the same day Gandhi began that fast, Godse and his colleagues started planning how to kill him. Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte acquired a Beretta M1934 pistol. The group began tracking Gandhi's daily movements.

  A first attempt came on the 20th of January 1948, ten days before the assassination. One of the plotters threw a grenade away from the crowd, creating a stampede that left Gandhi isolated on the speakers' platform. The original plan was to throw a second grenade at the isolated Gandhi, but Digambar Badge lost his nerve and fled with the crowd. All of the plotters escaped except Madanlal Pahwa, a Punjabi refugee of the Partition, who was arrested. The warning was not enough to change what was coming.

• 4. Five-Seventeen in the Garden

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  Manuben Gandhi, Gandhi's great-niece, wrote a memoir called Last Glimpses of Bapu, published in 1962, that recorded the day in close detail. Gandhi had started that morning listening to a recitation of the Bhagavad Gita. He was weighed after his bath and registered 109.5 pounds. He ate lunch with Pyarelalji and discussed the Noakhali riots. He napped in the afternoon.

  A meeting with Vallabhbhai Patel ran over time. Gandhi left for the prayer meeting about ten minutes late, walking with Manuben on his right and Abha Chatterjee on his left, using them as walking sticks. A stout young man in khaki dress bent over in the crowd with his hands folded. Manuben assumed he wanted to touch Gandhi's feet. She pushed the man aside, saying, "Bapu is already ten minutes late; why do you embarrass him?" Godse pushed her back so hard that she lost her balance and dropped the rosary, notebook, and Gandhi's spittoon she was carrying.

  As she bent to retrieve them, she heard four shots. Gandhi's hands were folded, and he was saying, "Hey Ram...! Hey Ram...!" The watch she carried showed 5:17 p.m. Blood was everywhere on their white clothes. According to Manuben's account, the first bullet struck the belly 3.5 inches to the right of the middle and 2.5 inches above the navel; the second hit 1 inch from the middle; the third 4 inches to the right. Bhai Saheb phoned the hospital repeatedly and could not get through. He went to Willingdon Hospital in person and came back without help. Colonel Bhargava arrived and pronounced Gandhi dead. The Manchester Guardian reported the time of death at 5:40 p.m., roughly half an hour after the shots.

• 5. The American Who Seized Godse

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  Herbert Reiner Jr. was a 32-year-old, newly arrived vice-consul at the American embassy in Delhi. On the 30th of January 1948, he arrived at Birla House after work, reaching the garden fifteen minutes before the prayer meeting was scheduled to begin. He later told colleagues that the security measures seemed inadequate, particularly given the bomb explosion at the same location ten days earlier.

  Reiner had moved closer to the path leading to the dais just before Gandhi arrived, later explaining, "An impulse to see more, and at a closer range, of this Indian leader impelled me to move away from the group in which I had been standing to the edge of the terrace steps." He was close enough to see Gandhi slow, turn, and give an annoyed look at a man in the crowd who told him he was late.

  After the shots, BBC reporter Robert Stimson, who was present, broadcast that night: "For a few seconds, no one could believe what had happened; everyone seemed dazed and numb. And then a young American who had come for prayers rushed forward and seized the shoulders of the man in the khaki coat. That broke the spell."

  Robert Trumbull of The New York Times, also an eyewitness, identified Reiner by name in a front-page story on the 31st of January 1948, describing how Reiner grasped the assailant by the shoulders and shoved him toward police guards. According to one account, Godse stood nearly motionless with the Beretta dangling in his right hand and made no attempt to escape. According to others, Godse himself called for the police after firing. The obituary for Reiner published by The Los Angeles Times in May 2000 noted that his role had appeared on the front pages of newspapers around the world.

• 6. Trial, Motive, Execution

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  The trial opened on the 27th of May 1948 at Delhi's Red Fort. Justice Atma Charan presided. The prosecution called 149 witnesses; the defense called none. After eight months, Justice Charan issued his final order on the 10th of February 1949. The court found all defendants except one guilty. Eight men were convicted for the murder conspiracy. Savarkar was acquitted and freed.

  Godse did not dispute the killing. He submitted a long statement explaining that he acted because Gandhi's influence over the Indian government bypassed democratic will, and because Gandhi's fasts and teachings had, in Godse's view, caused suffering to Hindus while offering comfort to Pakistan. In his court deposition Godse said, "I thought to myself and foresaw I shall be totally ruined, and the only thing I could expect from the people would be nothing but hatred... if I were to kill Gandhiji. But at the same time I felt that the Indian politics in the absence of Gandhiji would surely be proved practical, able to retaliate, and would be powerful with armed forces."

  Godse appealed only the finding that he had conspired with others, arguing that he alone was responsible. At the Punjab High Court in Shimla, Judge G. D. Khosla wrote afterward that when Godse finished speaking, the audience was visibly moved and many women were in tears. Khosla wrote that he had no doubt the audience, if constituted as a jury, would have returned a verdict of not guilty by an overwhelming majority. The High Court nevertheless confirmed the sentence.

  Pleas for commutation were submitted by Gandhi's sons Manilal Gandhi and Ramdas Gandhi. Prime Minister Nehru, Deputy Prime Minister Patel, and Governor-General Chakravarti Rajagopalachari all refused. Godse and Narayan Apte were hanged at Ambala Gaol on the 15th of November 1949. According to the Almanac of World Crime, Apte's neck broke and he died instantly. Godse died slowly, choking for fifteen minutes.

• 7. What the World Said

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  Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru addressed India by radio within hours: "Friends and comrades, the light has gone out of our lives, and there is darkness everywhere, and I do not quite know what to tell you or how to say it."

  Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founding Governor-General of Pakistan, issued a statement calling it "the most dastardly attack" and describing Gandhi as "one of the greatest men produced by the Hindu community." Field Marshal Jan Smuts of South Africa, who had once been Gandhi's direct adversary over the treatment of Indians in that country and had known Gandhi for more than thirty years, called him "a prince among men." British Prime Minister Clement Attlee said in a radio address on the night of the 30th of January 1948 that Gandhi had been "the major factor in every consideration of the Indian problem" for a quarter of a century.

  Albert Einstein wrote that Gandhi "died as the victim of his own principles, the principle of non-violence," adding that Gandhi had demonstrated that a powerful following could be built "not only through the cunning game of the usual political manoeuvres and trickery but through the cogent example of a morally superior conduct of life."

  More than two million people joined the funeral procession, which stretched five miles and took over five hours to travel from Birla House to Raj Ghat.

• 8. What Followed in India

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  The RSS was banned on the 4th of February 1948, five days after the assassination, once its former member Godse was publicly identified as the killer. The ban lasted one year. Within the following months, approximately twenty thousand RSS members were arrested.

  Historian Yasmin Khan argued that the funeral and mourning process, tightly controlled by the Congress party over two weeks, helped consolidate authority in the new Indian state under Nehru and Patel. The argument that India should be constituted as a Hindu state, as a counterpoint to Pakistan's founding as a Muslim one, lost force almost immediately because of the association of Hindu nationalism with the killing.

  Professor Claude Markovits, a Senior Research Fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, published a 2004 book, The UnGandhian Gandhi, arguing that the trial was rushed, attributing the haste to Patel's desire to avoid scrutiny for the failure to prevent the assassination. Godse's statement in his defense was banned immediately by the Indian government. It was not published until 1977, when the Congress party lost power for the first time since independence and the new government lifted the censorship. The text was republished in 1993 under the title Why I Assassinated Mahatma Gandhi?