But that was not the end. Split kept widening. A day after inaugurating the Ram temple at Ayodhya on January 22, 2024, the union cabinet last week adopted a resolution, saying the “country’s body was freed in 1947 but the soul has been consecrated now”. Adoption of such a visceral resolution just days before January 30 shows that it is nothing but an attempt at the second annihilation of Mahatma Gandhi.

The RSS, founded in 1925, was never a part of the freedom movement. Shackles were praised as an ‘act of Providence’ by first chief of the RSS, Dr KB Hedgewar in 1935. This was revealed in a news-report published in The Times of India on October 10, 1935: “The march of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh Volunteers in military order from the Town Hall to the Indian Gymkhana ground today ended the tenth annual celebrations of the Sangh. Dr. Moonje and Dr. Paranjpe were dressed in military uniform. At the meeting on Reshimbag ground in Nagpur, Dr Hedgewar, the chief promoter of the Sangh, said that the British Raj afforded them a lesson in organisation, and he looked upon it as an act of providence that the Britishers were ruling over them.” And what was the lesson? To keep alive the divide, never let them unite. It is not surprising that the RSS remained in conflict with the freedom fighters, and one of its members, Nathuram Godse, went to the extent of assassinating Mahatma Gandhi on January 30, 1948.

For last couple of years, as the RSS men rule the country and try to control its society and culture, Gandhian vision of a secular India with equal rights for all religions has once again come under attack. The period has witnessed massive efforts to steer the national discourse to treat Muslims as the ‘other’. Hate speeches, disturbing trends to portray Muslims as anti-nationals and violent attacks on them in the name of cow protection and ‘love jihad’ – described by Hindu nationalists as a ploy contrived by Muslim men to lure young Hindu women into marriage and conversion into Islam – have become frequent. These as well as the BJP government’s efforts to push forward its Hindu supremacist agenda, including a citizenship law seen to directly discriminate against Muslims, have started eroding and subjugating Gandhi’s vision of a secular democracy in India.

In fact, hardly ever in the past Godse was so openly extolled and sought to be given a place in the national memory as he has been since 2014. Hindu supremacists look to Modi as the deliverer of Hindu Rashtra and Godse as their predecessor who sought to remove the main hurdle their vision of India had faced at the time. Godse’s influence stems from their understanding that his act of assassinating Gandhi was not a crime but a step taken in right direction. They, therefore, don’t call this assassination a ‘hatya’ or murder, but a ‘vadh’, a term used to describe the slaying of the forces of evil.

In glorifying Godse, members of the ruling dispensation are sending a clear message that Gandhi’s ideas are anathema to them. The process has, therefore, coincided with open resentment towards Gandhi, who had refused to grant Hindus primacy over followers of other faiths. In Meerut, a leader of the Hindu Mahasabha captured media headlines on 30 January 2019 when she re-enacted the murder of Gandhi by shooting his effigy with an air pistol after garlanding the picture of Godse. But the resentment is not always symbolic: on 150th birth anniversary of Gandhi on 2 October 2019, the Gandhian memorial centre at Rewa in Madhya Pradesh was found vandalized and the word ‘traitor’ scrawled on the picture of the Mahatma. Similarly, in February 2022, a life-sized statue of Gandhi was found broken and thrown a few meters away in a park in the East Champaran district of Bihar.

The way the Ram temple inauguration was turned into a state event, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi taking a lead role, clearly shows that the BJP government is determined to undermine the secular democracy as mandated by the Indian Constitution.

Adoption of the new resolution close on the heels of the Ram temple inauguration seeks to play down even the significance of freedom struggle – a struggle which is a constant reminder of the RSS’s sordid and anti-freedom struggle past. It also threatens to annihilate the supreme leader of the freedom struggle – Mahatma Gandhi.

Shocking as they are, these developments raise only one question: Can India let its heroes and their glorious struggles and sacrifices be undermined simply because those who always stood against them want to do so? (IPA Service)