Views on Nathuram Godse’s Last Speech

26 Apr 2010 Share on:

Recently I read Nathuram Godse’s courtroom speech¹, the one he delivered when tried for the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. It is a text that has been quoted, shared, selectively edited, and mythologised for decades. I wanted to sit with it myself rather than rely on what others say about it.

This post is my attempt to process that reading, in my own words and from my own contradictions.

The nationalist in Godse and in me

From his speech, what I see first is an over zealous nationalist mind. For Godse the nation largely maps to a Hindu nation. In his telling, his duty is to “Hindudom” and to Hindus, and protecting that becomes the ultimate justification for his choices.

I do not find that impulse completely alien. I also sometimes wonder whether we do justice to the idea of India as a secular state. Are we really being fair to everyone, or are we pretending equality on paper and failing in practice. The history of the last century gives enough reasons to ask uncomfortable questions.

Two parts of what we now call our civilisational space, today named Pakistan and Bangladesh, were cut away during Partition. Large parts of the Indus Valley heritage, which we celebrate in our textbooks as the cradle of Indian civilisation, now fall outside present day India. It is tempting to feel that this heritage has been handed over to people who were once invaders and aggressors on this land.

This is emotional language, and I know it, but it is also honest. That sense of loss and dispossession is one of the ghosts behind Godse’s words, and it is one of the ghosts that still haunts us.

Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the question of legitimacy

There is another question that troubles me and that Godse’s speech brings sharply into focus. What exactly was Jinnah’s contribution to the freedom struggle that entitled him to ask for a separate nation as his share. I fail to see a clear moral basis for that demand.

The Muslim League, especially in its later decades, often seems to have chosen safety through separation rather than a shared civic future. It looked more aligned with sectional interests and imperial convenience than with a united anti-colonial struggle. How does such an organisation claim the right to carve out Pakistan as a “solution” to communal tensions.

Just because the fear of civil war was real, and just because the bloodshed happened anyway, does not automatically make the choice of Partition wise or just. My complaint with our leaders of that time is that they obliged the demand for Pakistan in the name of avoiding civil war, and we ended up with a divided land and the civil war like violence all the same.

Is India a Hindu nation

At this point I find myself partially in agreement with Savarkar’s idea that India is a Hindu nation in a civilisational sense. I understand the feeling that this civilisation has a particular spine and continuity, and that spine has grown primarily through what we call Hindu traditions.

There is a question that immediately arises though. If India is a Hindu nation, what does that mean for Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists. Do we quietly fold them into a broad civilisational “Hindu” identity? If not, are they also to live as permanent minorities without full rights. That conclusion is something I cannot accept.

Jains and Buddhists have clearly helped shape Indian culture. Their philosophies, kings, art, and ethics are part of the same civilisational fabric. If Emperor Ashoka had remained an orthodox “Hindu” ruler, perhaps he would have been constructed as the ultimate Hindu icon and the character of Ram would not need to carry quite so much civilisational weight. History took another route. That is a different debate, but it shows how fluid these labels can be.

The key point for me is this. If I accept Jains and Buddhists as children of this soil, because their traditions arose here and transformed this land, then I must admit something similar about many Muslims. The religion did not originate here, yet over time many of those who arrived as aggressors, traders or migrants absorbed the culture, married into it, spoke its languages, and became Indian in their own right.

To say that Muslim rulers were always ruthless and uninterested in India is to oversimplify centuries of history. They were as much a part of the evolving idea of India as those who came before and after them. I do not consider Indian Muslims foreigners. At the same time I do not believe that any community, including Muslims, has the right to take away a part of the land and claim it exclusively as theirs.

There the line is clear for me. People can be fully at home in a land without claiming that its map must match their religious identity.

Where I break from Godse completely

This is where my agreement with Godse stops abruptly.

Godse says Gandhi was guilty of “blunder after blunder, failure after failure, disaster after disaster.” He treats Gandhi’s decisions as a chain of betrayals and incompetence. In this he fails to understand how mass based movements actually work.

A movement involving millions of people cannot stay in permanent agitation. It must rise and rest, stop to regroup, and restart at the right moment. Campaigns are withdrawn not always because the leader is weak or confused, but because people and circumstances have limits. If Godse had recognised this basic rhythm of political struggle, he would have found it harder to dismiss Gandhi’s leadership as simple failure.

I also disagree with Godse when he claims he cannot accept Gandhi’s leadership. Leadership is not magic. It rests on trust. If you choose someone as your leader and then refuse to follow their strategy at every step, that is really a confession about your own lack of trust, not only about their flaws.

Imagine a war where the soldiers start doubting the commander in the middle of battle. The result is chaos, not victory. In politics, we are not soldiers and obedience is not the ultimate virtue, but if you publicly accept someone as a leader and then undermine them every time your preferences are not followed, you are playing a strange double game.

If you cannot reconcile your conscience with a leader’s methods, the honest path is to step away and build another politics, not to wait, accumulate grievances, and one day pull a gun.

This is what Godse ultimately fails to understand. He fails to separate disagreement from dehumanisation. He fails to accept that in a political community the remedy for disappointment with a leader is more politics, more organising, more persuasion, not assassination.

The unforgivable leap

In the end, Godse attempts to justify the unjustifiable. He presents himself as someone who had no legal remedy, no institutional recourse, no alternative. He claims that the “existence of Gandhi should be brought to an end immediately” to save the nation. That is the fatal leap.

He admits that he foresaw his own ruin. He knew he would be hated. Yet he chose to turn that into a tragic badge of honour rather than a warning that he had crossed the line where politics ends and fanaticism begins.

For me there is a simple test. If your love for your country requires you to shoot an unarmed old man at a prayer meeting, then your love has taken a monstrous form. You have confused the nation with your own hurt and anger.

I can share some of Godse’s questions. I can share some of his anger about Partition, about the weakness of some leaders, about the mess and hypocrisy in how secularism is practised. I cannot share his conclusion that bullets are a valid answer to those questions.

Nathuram Godse, in my reading, fails to grasp some basic tenets of life in a shared society. He mistakes his own interpretation of duty for the only possible truth and then tries to wrap a murder in the language of sacrifice and courage. No matter how passionately he argues, that act cannot be justified.

There is room to question Gandhi. There is room to criticise Nehru. There is room to re examine Savarkar. There is no room to glorify the assassination of a political opponent as patriotism.

That is the point where I stop walking with Godse and turn away.