WASHINGTON: Seventy-five years after the assassination of India’s founder Mahatma Gandhi, has become a casualty of India’s lurch toward Hindu extremism, a prominent Indian journalist wrote in a in the Washington Post, while highlighting that Gandhi’s killer is now being interpreted as a hero.
“The Mahatma is now hated by extremists in India for failing to set up a Hindu government in India when he had the opportunity. Instead, Mahatma Gandhi advocated Hindu-Muslim unity in one secular state,” Rana Ayyub, an outspoken critic of Indian extremist Prime Minister Narendra Modi, said in her article in The Washington Post.
She pointed out that on Gandhi’s 154th birthday anniversary, three of the top ten trends on social media in India celebrated Nathuram Godse, the Hindu extremist who killed Mahatma Gandhi. A month before that, it added, at one of the biggest Hindu festivals in India, posters and banners of Godse were displayed along with those of Hindu deities in Gandhi’s birthplace of Gujarat.
Hindu Extremists Denigrate India’s founder Gandhi for Advocating Hindu-Muslim Unity: WP
Godse alleged Gandhi for the loss of Pakistan during partition although he (Gandhi) opposed partition, felt Gandhi was pro-Muslim and also feared that Hindus would continue to lose ground if Mahatma Gandhi remained as an influence on the government.
Godse was an active member of the Hindu extremist paramilitary organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which is the ideological fountainhead of the current Prime Minister Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, Ayyub wrote. And since Narendra Modi was first elected in 2014, the narrative alleging Gandhi has taken hold.
“On Colaba, a busy, touristy street in Mumbai, India a seller of memorabilia across from the Taj Mahal Palace hotel was not impressed when I selected a bronze souvenir depicting Gandhi on the 1930 Dandi March, protesting the UK’s tax on salt. He said the only foreigners buy things like,” Ayyub wrote.
“The merchant, told me that a new generation of in India has a different view of the man referred to as ‘the founder of India.’ He tells me that Mahatma Gandhi partitioned India to appease Muslims and appear as a humanist to the international world.”
“This school of thought is not an anomaly. Indian extremist Prime Minister Modi has referenced M.S. Golwalkar, who led the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh at the time of the assassination, as a main inspiration. It was Golwalkar who had said at a rally of the Hindu right-wing on December. 7, 1947, that ‘Gandhi wanted to keep the Muslims in India so that the Congress may profit by their ballots at the time of polls … We have the means whereby such people can be immediately silenced, but it is our tradition not to be hostile to Hindus. If we are forced, we will have to resort to that course too.’ A month later, Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated.”:
Ayyub wrote that she observed that a student mocked Gandhi, writing him off as merely the grandfather of ‘Pappu’ (an insulting term coined for Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi). Gandhi has never been this unpopular in India, she further wrote.
“However, since ultranationalist Hinduism and extremism took hold, Gandhi’s image has thrashed. In 2019, member of parliament from Modi’s BJP, Pragya Singh Thakur, called extremist Godse a ‘patriot’ on the floor of the house. “Still, the Hindu Mahasabha, another extension of the extremist RSS, now celebrates Gandhi’s assassination in public as ‘Shaurya Divas’ (Bravery Day), and on the 71st anniversary of Gandhi’s murder, in 2019, re-created his murder for the cameras to loud clapping from followers. Modi’s Union Minister, Giriraj Singh, also called Gandhi’s murderer ‘India’s good son’.
“Over the last several years, textbooks in India have been revised to remove facts that don’t support the favored narrative. ‘The background of Gandhi’s killer Nathuram Godse … and the fact that Gandhi stood for Hindu-Muslim unity and also opposed Hindu majoritarianism following Independence have all been removed,’.
