EDITOR'S PICK

01 November, 2014

SHORTLY AFTER 5 PM ON 30 JANUARY 1948, Nathuram Vinayak Godse fired three shots into the chest of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi at Birla House, Delhi. Gandhi died on the spot. After a year-long trial on 15 November 1949, Godse and his co-conspirator Narayan Apte became the first Indians to be hanged since the country’s independence. This November marks 65 years since their execution.

A high-school dropout from Pune, Godse was a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh until the early 1940s, when he broke from the group to start the Hindu Rashtra Dal, a pan-Hindu militant organisation vehemently opposed to an India tolerant towards Muslims. Godse blamed Gandhi for the thousands of Hindu deaths that resulted from Partition, and made several earlier attempts on his life as well.

Justice GD Khosla of the Punjab High Court, one of the three judges who presided over Godse’s appeal against an earlier trial court judgement, later commented on the assassin’s peroration in his own defence before the tribunal. “The audience was visibly and audibly moved,” he wrote in The Murder of the Mahatma, published in 1963. “Many women were in tears and men were coughing and searching for their handkerchiefs. … It seemed to me that I was taking part in some kind of melodrama or in a scene out of a Hollywood feature film.” Khosla believed that “had the audience of that day been constituted into a jury and entrusted with the task of deciding Godse’s appeal, they would have brought in a verdict of ‘not guilty’ by an overwhelming majority.”