The nation he was the creator of was to be one with many. It was not to the liking of those who were keen to keep India fragmented. They were one with British rulers and their loyalty was threatened by Bapu, the man who led the freedom struggle. It was Gandhi who identified the spreading gloom in the entire world economy. Stagnation was leading to collapse of colonialism. Bapu seized the moment and used it to serve his own purpose. We attained freedom. With great love for his people, till the last, he accepted the end, in harness.

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 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 this year shows that it is nothing but an attempt at the second annihilation of Mahatma Gandhi.

And the third attempt to bury Mahatma Gandhi took place last week when Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the world did not know about Mahatma Gandhi until his biographical film was made in 1982. Modi made the strange claim during an interview given to ABP News. He said Gandhi was not as known worldwide as American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. or former South African president and anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela.

Contrast these words of Modi as he quoted Albert Einstein saying about Gandhi way back in 1939: “Generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.”

While writing an op-ed piece for The New York Times on October 2, 2019, the same Modi Ironically had mentioned the above quote of Einstein delivered on the 70th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi on October 2, 1939. In the same piece, Modi had also written about the influence Gandhi had on Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr.

For last couple of years, the country has been in the hands of the RSS who do not leave any opportunity to shape with iron hands its culture and society. Gandhian vision of secular India with equal rights for all religions is today under sharp attack. There are seen 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’, 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, Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram 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 towards accomplishing a sacred duty.

Gandhi was rightly called Father of our Nation by Communist Party general secretary P C Joshi, in 1945-46. Our own national movement that was aimed at building up a socio- political system had Bapu among its leaders. It was the system based on a social democratic foundation, where it had a Gramscian theoretical perspective, state power not occupied at a single evolutionary moment, but moving through a longer popular struggle at a political and ideological level. Our national movement had also played a historical role when it started adopting the ideals of our Constitution and also the space it had offered. Our national movement was a rare combination of diverse streams with various ideological and political currents that was a lesson how to unite in diversity. It was the striking power for our movement that gave us cohesion and also strength.

In 1947, when we attained freedom, it was not one but each of the forces with their own freedom of existence had a share in it, except the one who looked upon it “(…) as an act of providence that the Britishers were ruling over them.” It was the observation made by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, first chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh 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. It was the tenth annual celebrations of the Sangh and RSS leaders like Dr Moonje and Dr Paranjpe were dressed in military uniform.”

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. (IPA Service)