In a cruel irony, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi – the much-lauded ‘Father of the Nation – was `re-assassinated’ on Martyr’s Day, the day commemorating his first assassination by Nathuram Godse over seven decades ago.
On a day of national remembrance of Gandhi’s martyrdom, members of the Hindu Mahasabha – the right-wing organisation which Godse allegedly belonged to – celebrated the occasion as `Shaurya Dewas’, and its national secretary, Puja Shakun Pandey, re-enacted the assassination by `shooting’ at an image of the Mahatma with a toy pistol, while her associates made a video recording of the event.
Over the recent past, Gandhi has been targeted by both the political left as well as the quasi-religious Hindu right. The left has assailed him as a bourgeois reactionary, and the Hindu right for his supposedly pro-minority stance.
Indeed, the recent `re-assassination’ of Gandhi is only the latest in a series of murderous assaults on the memory of the man, and the philosophy of ahimsa and tolerance for which he sacrificed his life.
Every incident of Naxal violence which claims innocent lives, every fatal attack on social activists and rationalists by far-right fundamentalists, every lynching of so-called cattle smugglers, are in effect a replaying of his assassination, a lethally vicious repudiation of all the social and spiritual values he embodied.
To add insult to injury, on the same day that the Hindu Mahasabha `re-assassinated’ him, political dignitaries, starting with Prime Minister Modi, paid ritual homage to Gandhi in a public, and much-publicised, ceremonies.
Seldom has blatant hypocrisy worn a more pious face than in this farce in which we pay lip service to his ideals while daily we murder the memory of the ‘Father of the Nation’ by waging war on the ideals of non-violence and universal humanity he stood for.
Had he been alive today, Gandhi wouldn’t have recognised the nation which calls him its Father.