The irrelevance of Mahatma Gandhi in Modi's India

Gandhi, also called the Father of the Nation was the first casualty of Hindu nationalism in India. Today he is the subject of mockery and disdain for a country reveling in right wing nationalism.

Earlier this year, on the 154th birthday of Mohandas Gandhi, a national

holiday in India, three of the top ten Twitter trends in the country celebrated

Nathuram Godse, the Hindu fundamentalist who assassinated Gandhi.

The month before, at one of the biggest Hindu festivals in India, the Ganeshotsava,

posters of Godse were displayed along with those of Hindu deities in the state

neighboring Gandhi’s birthplace of Gujarat. This would be akin to carrying posters of

John Wilkes Booth at a President’s Day parade.

Seventy-five years after his assassination, Gandhi, the man who led India out of

British rule, revered in the west as the exemplar of nonviolent protest -- has become

a casualty of India’s lurch toward Hindu nationalism. The Mahatma is now reviled by

Hindu nationalists for failing to establish a Hindu government in India when he had

the chance. Instead, Gandhi advocated Hindu-Muslim unity in one secular state,

India, the world’s largest Democracy.

On Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, Godse, the assassin, has a newfound

fanbase that portrays him as a hero. Executed by hanging in 1949, he had tried to kill

Gandhi twice before he succeeded: once with a knife, once with a dagger. In both

cases, Gandhi declined to press charges, so the young man was released despite

openly threatening the leader. The third time he used a gun. He blamed

[outlookindia.com]Gandhi for the loss of Pakistan during partition (although Gandhi

opposed partition), felt Gandhi was pro-Muslim and feared that Hindus would

continue to lose ground if Gandhi remained as an influence on the government.

Godse was a member of the Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization Rashtriya

Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which is the ideological fountainhead of Prime Minister

Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). And since Modi was first elected in

2014, the narrative blaming Gandhi has taken hold.

On Colaba, a bustling, touristy street in Mumbai, a seller of memorabilia across from

the Taj Mahal Palace hotel was not impressed when I picked a bronze souvenir

depicting Gandhi on the 1930 Dandi March, protesting Britain’s tax on salt. He said

the only people who buy things like that are “white foreigners.”

The merchant, who hails from Gujarat, did not wish to be named but told me that a

new generation of Indians has a different opinion of the man referred to as “the

father of the nation.” . He tells me that Gandhi partitioned India to appease

Muslims and appear as a humanist to the world to be labelled a

‘Mahatma’. “The world loves to put pseudo secularists like him on a

pedestal but we are now aware of his reality”

This school of thought is not an aberration. Modi has referenced Guruji Golwalkar,

who led the RSS at the time of the assassination, as a major inspiration

[caravanmagazine.in]. It was Golwalkar who had stated [thewire.in] at a rally of the

Hindu right wing on December 7 1947 that “Mahatma Gandhi wanted to keep the

Muslims in India so that the Congress [party] may profit by their votes at the time of

election . . . We have the means whereby such men can be immediately silenced, but

it is our tradition not to be inimical to Hindus. If we are compelled, we will have to

resort to that course too.” A month later, Gandhi was killed.

At the Sabarmati Ashram in Gujarat, one of the homes of the Mahatma, I

encountered teenagers posing for selfies and picnicking on the lawn. When I asked

questions about Gandhi, they seemed uninterested, one says, he is the man

whose face is on the Indian rupee.

Another college student mocks Gandhi, writing him off as merely the grandfather of

‘pappu’ (a derogatory term coined for Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi, who is

not in fact related to the Mahatma).

Gandhi has never been this unpopular. The 1982 Richard Attenborough biopic about

him won eight Academy Awards and introduced a new generation to the Indian

independence fighter.