Mon, May 26, 2003 page5

• Plotter still firm in beliefs that killed Gandhi

  • AP
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  In a dingy two-room apartment, where cardboard boxes spill over with a lifetime's worth of angry writings, an elderly man keeps watch over the memory of his long-dead brother, and the story of the murder that thrust them into worldwide attention more than 50 years ago.

  "I want to explain how I was connected to this Gandhi assassination," Gopal Godse says, beginning his story.

  His voice is calm, his sunken grey-green eyes are fixed on his listener. But his words convey the cold, unrepentant fury that drove a small group of conspirators, led by his brother, to plot the killing of Mohandas Gandhi, the pacifist who led his nation to independence, fought for equality in a nation sharply divided by caste and became one of the most revered men in modern history.

  "We did not want this man to live," said Godse, a thin, bookish man who spent 16 years in prison for his role in Gandhi's 1948 murder. "We did not want this man to die a natural death, even if 10 lives were to be lost for that purpose."

  "He was a very cruel person for the Hindus," said Godse, a fervent Hindu.

  In Godse's upside-down world, Gandhi's calls for nonviolence were part of a plot to allow Hindus to be slaughtered by Muslims, and his urging for peace with over-whelmingly Muslim Pakistan was a betrayal of Hinduism, which Godse believes should rule over much of South Asia.

  At 83, Godse is the last of the conspirators left alive. But Godse has also lived long enough to see his beliefs, once on the fringes of Hindu militancy, move into the Indian mainstream -- albeit in a milder version.

  Today India is ruled by a coalition led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, a Hindu party whose roots lie in another organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh -- the RSS or National Volunteers Association.

  Godse despises the current government, which India's secularists see as hard-liners but which he believes is too moderate. But his beliefs are common among the government's more militant supporters. In a nation of more than a billion people -- some 840 million of them Hindus -- Godse and like-minded Indians see Hindus as deeply oppressed.

  It may seem incongruous that an overwhelming majority would see itself as threatened, but it's a commonly heard fear among believers in Hindutva, or "Hindu-ness," the doctrine that India should be governed by Hindu beliefs.

  Self-defense training with bamboo staffs, swords and rifles is common among hard-line Hindutva believers, and Hindu suicide squads have vowed to defend their motherland.

  The doctrine reaches from military training grounds to classrooms. Government textbooks distributed since the rise of the Hindu nationalist government have been criticized for such things as omitting mention of Gandhi's assassination, discussing Nazism without mentioning its racist ideology and saying a Hindu swami "established the superiority of Indian thought and culture over the Western mind."

  Such issues have sparked a firestorm of criticism from India's secular intelligentsia, to whom Godse is an extreme example of the dangers of the militant movement.

  The killing of Gandhi "was actually an assault on secularism by the Hindu right, and what Gopal Godse is doing is continuing that assault," said Kamal Mitra Chenoy, an international studies professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and a prominent liberal crusader.

  "For someone to be proud of his role in murdering the father of the nation is an insult to the entire nation," he said.

  Godse sees the situation far differently.

  "If you do not protect your culture, your sovereignty is lost, your self-rule is lost," Godse said. "That is what you must realize."

  Godse's tiny apartment, where light filters in through laundry strung in front of the windows, is a monument to the assassination plot. In the office-living room, there is a larger-than-life photograph of a smiling Nathuram Godse adorned with a cheap plastic garland.

  Despite his virulent hatred of Muslims and his lurking suspicions of nearly everyone else, Godse is surprisingly polite and soft-spoken.

  But if Godse sometimes seems pitiful, he doesn't want pity. He only wants people to believe that the man they revere as a modern saint, a man most refer to as mahatma, or "great soul," was a fraud.

  "If the people knew the reasons [for the assassination], Gandhi would be exposed," he said.

  Godse's life has been shaped the belief that India is inherently Hindu and should be governed by its principles. He lives in a haze of relentless conspiracies, a high caste Hindu who sees himself, and all Hindus, as victims of Muslim plotting.

  This is not bigotry, he insists, but self-preservation.

  Godse believes Gandhi turned his back on the Hindus, allowing British India to be divided in 1947 into modern India and Pakistan. He insists that Muslims want to convert, or kill, all nonbelievers, and that peace between the two religions is impossible.

  "When they say we have good relations with Muslims, it's all humbug, it's all bogus," he said, his voice momentarily angry. "You can't expect the Muslim to give up his religion."

  The final insult came when Gandhi, a Hindu himself, launched a hunger strike to force India to pay money it owed Pakistan.

  The conspirators were ideologues, not trained terrorists, and their plotting was often amateurish.

  Despite that, they succeeded on Jan. 30, 1948. That evening, Gandhi, a weak 78-year-old man, was walking toward the prayer ground in the garden of a New Delhi home when Nathuram Godse stepped in front of him and fired three shots.

  Gandhi died within moments.

  Nathuram Godse was tackled by bystanders and arrested. The other conspirators, including Gopal, who had returned to Pune, the family's hometown, after an earlier failed attempt to kill Gandhi, were arrested within days. Nathuram and one other conspirator were hanged in 1949, the rest were sentenced to prison terms.

  Nearly 40 years after his 1965 release, Godse's beliefs remain unchanged. He talks of the horrors of India's 1947 partition, in which 1 million people were killed -- mostly Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs -- as if it happened a few weeks ago. And while all those religions share blame in the sectarian bloodshed, he says Hindus acted only in self-defense. Now, he awaits the day when India's Muslims convert to Hinduism.

  Where he sees hope, most people see terror.

  He speaks almost gleefully about riots last year in the western state of Gujarat when about 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed.

  "If [Muslims] get the reaction like they did in Gujarat, they will get to know that Muslims are not supreme," Godse said.

  But he knows the Hindu paradise he wants -- an India freed of Muslims, and again in control of Pakistan's territory -- will not come in his lifetime.

  "It may be 100 years, it may be 200 years, it will eventually happen," he said.
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