THE APOSTLE OF HATE
SHORTLY BEFORE HIS EXECUTION, in the early hours of 15 November 1949, Nathuram Vinayak Godse, the Hindu-nationalist fanatic who killed Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on 30 January 1948, recited a prayer:
Namaste Sada Vatsale Matrubhume
Twaya Hindubhume Sukham Vardhitoham
Mahanmangale Punyabhume Twadarthe
Patatvesh Kayo Namaste, Namaste!
O affectionate motherland, I eternally bow to you
O land of Hindus, you have reared me in comfort
O sacred and holy land,
May this body of mine be dedicated to you and I bow before you again and again!
These four Sanskrit sentences constitute the first of the three stanzas of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s official prayer, which continues to be sung to this day at its shakhas—regular assemblies meant for physical and ideological training.
Godse’s choice of prayer is puzzling. He is believed to have left the RSS sometime around 1938, when he joined the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha—the biggest Hindu-nationalist political party at the time. But the Sanskrit prayer, which replaced a previous Marathi version, was only drafted in 1939 and became popular among RSS cadres much later. Clearly, for Godse to know it, he would have to have had post-1939 RSS links.
Narayan Dattatreya Apte—Godse’s accomplice, who was also hanged in Ambala central jail that morning—joined him in reciting the prayer. This was recorded in detail by Godse’s brother Gopal Vinayak Godse, in his memoir Gandhiji’s Murder & After. Gopal was himself one of the convicts in Gandhi’s murder case, and served a life sentence in the same prison. He had requested the jail superintendent that he be allowed to attend the execution, but he only got permission to spend time with his brother and Apte in their solitary confinement cell that morning till 7.30, half an hour before their hanging.
This was perhaps the first and only time Apte recited the RSS prayer. Unlike Godse, he had never formally joined the RSS and had even disliked the organisation for not being extremist enough.
The affinity Godse had for the RSS seems to have changed Apte’s attitude towards it. Only a few days before being hanged, Apte revealed this transformation in a conversation with Gopal.
“Well, you often criticize the R.S.S. … but you have really outdone those Sangh volunteers!” Gopal told Apte during one of his regular visits to Godse and Apte after their death sentence was confirmed. “With a smile brightening up his face, Nana said, ‘To tell you the truth, it is our experience for the last four years or more that we [Godse and Apte] generally think on the same lines.’” Apte added, “And as regards the R.S.S., if you ask me, we two are the only volunteers who actually lived the sacred vow chanted by the Sangh Volunteers, every day, namely, ‘Patatvesha Kayo Namaste Namaste!’”
The RSS, however, could not muster the courage to acknowledge Gandhi’s assassin as one of its own. The first official reaction of the RSS was an outright denial of its association with Godse in any form and at any point of time. “The Sangha Chalak of Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh, Bombay, in a statement says the alleged assassin of Mahatma Gandhi was never connected in any way with the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh,” the Hindustan Times reported on 2 February 1948. Two days later, the RSS was banned. Several leaders, including its then sarsanghchalak—supreme leader—MS Golwalkar, were arrested. They were soon released due to lack of evidence against them and the organisation.
On 8 November 1948, Godse made a statement to the special court trying him that proved quite convenient for the RSS. “I am one of those volunteers of Maharashtra who joined the Sang-ha in its initial stage,” he said. “I also worked for a few years on the intellectual side in the Province of Maharashtra. Having worked for the uplift of the Hindus I felt it necessary to take part in the political activities of the country for the protection of the just rights of the Hindus. I therefore left the Sangha and joined the Hindu Mahasabha.”
The RSS, which had claimed to have had absolutely no association with Godse, ran with the new line. Through 1949, as Godse and other accused were being tried, Golwalkar went about lobbying to lift the ban on the organisation. The RSS now argued that Godse did indeed join the RSS sometime during the early 1930s, but that he quit the organisation long before he killed Gandhi, and that his association with the RSS ended as soon as he joined the Hindu Mahasabha. The ban was lifted in July that year. On 15 November, Godse was hanged. He was now being referred to as a “former member” of the RSS. The RSS also managed to convince many that not only did the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha exist separately, but even that there was discord between the two organisations.
For most of history since then, the claim that Godse gave up his RSS membership has gone unchallenged. In March 2014, when the Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said in an election rally that an RSS member had been responsible for Gandhi’s death, the organisation filed a defamation case against him. In its oral observations, in July 2016, the Supreme Court reprimanded Rahul for his “collective denunciation” of the RSS and told him that he would have to face trial if he did not express regret for his remark. Rahul refused to apologise, and the case is pending. The Supreme Court was so sure of Godse’s background that it thought it wise to scold Rahul without examining the evidence. Not just the court, even liberal or neutral researchers often concede that Godse was a not a member of the RSS when he killed Gandhi. Eminent historians, such as Ramachandra Guha, and even top international publications, such as the New Yorker, have described him as a “former member” of the RSS.
Regardless, Godse has continued to hold pride of place in the imagination of Hindutva followers, despite the RSS’s attempts to distance itself from him. Prominent office-bearers with affiliations to the Sangh and its political arm, the Bharatiya Janata Party, have often expressed appreciation for Godse. With a former RSS pracharak—a full-time worker—Narendra Modi as the prime minister since 2014, the BJP’s leaders are embracing Godse more openly. The BJP MPs Sakshi Maharaj and Pragya Singh Thakur, the latter an accused in the 2008 Malegaon blasts, have praised Godse multiple times. The BJP government of Uttar Pradesh has proposed renaming Meerut district to “Pandit Nathuram Godse Nagar.”
Even as Godse-worship has gone mainstream, the RSS has stayed silent for a very practical reason: to avoid being implicated in the assassination of the man considered the father of the nation.
Several historical documents that I discovered during my research on Godse over the past eight months confirm that he never gave up his membership of the RSS. Most importantly, a statement Godse gave in March 1948, six months before his statement to the special court, seems to have been ignored by generations of academics and journalists—perhaps due to the fact that it is only available in its entirety in Marathi. The statement, which is also a brief autobiography, never mentions Godse’s departure from the RSS and proves that he was working for both the RSS and Mahasabha at the same time. Pages 18 and 19 of the document, in which he describes the early 1940s,
