The man who killed Gandhi w/ Dhirendra K. Jha

Politics Theory Other

Dhirendra K. Jha joins PTO to talk about his book, Gandhi's Assassin: The Making of Nathuram Godse and His Idea of India. We talked about Godse's childhood and how is belonging to the elite Brahmin class facilitated his shift from an anti-imperialist position in the decades before independence, to a visceral hatred of Muslims and of Gandhi, who the Hindu nationalists blamed for partition and the creation of Pakistan. We also discussed Godse's relationship with Vinayak Sawarkar - the ideological founder of Hindu nationalism and the chief early propagator of the idea of Hindu Rashtra - the concept of India as a fundamentally Hindu nation - as opposed to a secular state of all its people. We went on to talk about how Italian fascism and German Nazism inspired the RSS, and finally we discussed the increasing rehabilitation of the reputation of Godse amongst Hindu nationalists, including BJP members of the Indian parliament.