Nathuram Godse

• 1. Introduction

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  Nathuram Godse fired three bullets into Mahatma Gandhi's chest at exactly 05:05 pm on the 30th of January 1948. The setting was a raised lawn behind Birla House, a mansion in New Delhi, where Gandhi had been staying and where he walked to prayer meetings each evening. In the seconds after Gandhi fell, it was not a soldier or a police officer who seized the gunman. It was Herbert Reiner Jr., a 32-year-old American vice-consul attending the gathering, who spun Godse by the shoulders into the arms of military personnel and held him by the neck until police arrived. Reiner reported later that Godse looked a little stunned at how easily he had carried out his plan. Who was this man? What had driven him, through two failed attempts before this one, to kill the figure the world would come to call the Father of the Nation? And what happened to his name and legacy in the decades that followed?

• 2. A Nose-Ring and a Name

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  Nathuram Vinayakrao Godse was born on the 19th of May 1910, into a Maharashtrian Chitpavan Brahmin family. His father, Vinayak Vamanrao Godse, worked as a postal employee. At birth, the boy was named Ramachandra. His parents had already lost three sons to what they feared was a curse targeting their male children, and so young Ramachandra was raised, for the first years of his life, as a girl. His nose was pierced. He wore a nose-ring, called a nath in Marathi. That detail gave him the nickname by which he would be known forever: Nathuram, meaning "Ram with a nose-ring." Only after a younger brother was born did the family begin treating him as a boy again. He attended the local school in Baramati until the fifth standard, after which he was sent to live with an aunt in Pune to study at an English-language school. He never finished high school.

• 3. Ideology and Organisation

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  Godse joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in Sangli, Maharashtra, in 1932, in the role of boudhik karyawah, meaning ground worker. He joined as a simultaneous member of the Hindu Mahasabha, a Hindutva political party. Both were right-wing organisations rooted in the Hindu nationalist ideology of Hindutva, which had been formulated by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, whom Godse regarded as his mentor. Godse was a prominent populariser of Savarkar's works. During his early years in the RSS, Godse worked alongside M. S. Golwalkar, who would later become the RSS chief. Together they translated Babarao Savarkar's book "Rashtra Mimansa" into English. The partnership fractured when Golwalkar took sole credit for that translation. By 1942, Godse had broken away sufficiently to form his own organisation, the Hindu Rashtra Dal, which he announced on the Vijayadashami day of that year; he nonetheless remained formally enrolled in both the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha. In 1946, Godse publicly claimed to have left the RSS over the question of India's partition. His own later deposition in Marathi contradicted this: in it he wrote that while he had joined the Hindu Mahasabha, "I remained active in Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh." A 2020 investigation published by The Caravan further established that RSS meeting records listed Godse as a member long after he claimed to have resigned. His own family stated he never left.

• 4. Two Failed Attempts

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  In May 1944, Godse led a group of fifteen to twenty young men who rushed at Gandhi during a prayer meeting at Panchgani with the intent to attack him with a knife. The crowd blocked their path, and no harm was done. Gandhi declined to press criminal charges, and Godse was released. A second attempt came in September 1944, when Godse led another group to block Gandhi's passage from Sevagram to Mumbai. This time Godse was arrested carrying a dagger, and he made explicit threats to kill Gandhi. Once again, Gandhi's standing policy of refusing to press charges led directly to Godse's release. Those two episodes illuminate something about the environment around Gandhi: the violence that would eventually succeed had been forecast, openly, years before it arrived. Godse spent the intervening years writing articles for newspapers, publishing his views, and plotting with his co-conspirator Narayan Apte and six others.

• 5. Trial and Execution

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  Godse stood trial at the Punjab High Court in Peterhoff, Shimla. The proceedings lasted more than a year. On the 8th of November 1949, he was sentenced to death. Gandhi's sons Manilal Gandhi and Ramdas Gandhi petitioned for the sentence to be commuted, despite the fact that Godse had killed their father. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Deputy Prime Minister Vallabhbhai Patel, and Governor-General Chakravarti Rajagopalachari each turned down those appeals. Godse was hanged at Ambala Central Jail on the 15th of November 1949. He was thirty-nine years old. His brother Gopal Godse would later state that all the Godse brothers had been members of the RSS at the moment of the assassination, and that the organisation had disowned them without justification.

• 6. Aftermath and Rehabilitation

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  Millions of Indians mourned Gandhi's death. The Hindu Mahasabha was widely vilified, and the RSS was temporarily banned. The organisation has since maintained, against the weight of the evidence, that Godse left the RSS in the mid-1930s. Decades later, a different current emerged. In 2014, following the Bharatiya Janata Party's rise to power, the Hindu Mahasabha began a campaign to reframe Godse as a patriot. It requested Prime Minister Narendra Modi to install a bust of Godse, and it produced a documentary film titled Desh Bhakt Nathuram Godse for release on the 30th of January 2015, which was Gandhi's death anniversary. There were efforts to build a temple to Godse and to designate that date as Shaurya Diwas, or Bravery Day. A civil suit filed in Pune Court sought to block the documentary's release. In May 2019, BJP candidate from Bhopal Pragya Thakur called Godse a "patriot" in the lead-up to the final phase of Indian elections; she apologised after facing backlash. The city of Meerut was proposed for renaming in Godse's honour, though the district magistrate ruled out the possibility. A Marathi-language play, Me Nathuram Godse Boltoy, written by Pradeep Dalvi and based on the book May It Please Your Honour by Gopal Godse, has kept Godse's own account of his motivations circulating in public life. Journalist Subhash Gatade, writing in his 2011 book Godse's Children: Hindutva Terror in India, called the assassination "the first terrorist act in independent India" - a characterisation that author Rohini Hensman endorsed in a 2012 review, arguing that if terrorism means violence in pursuit of a political goal, Gandhi's killing qualifies.