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A Tale of Two Murders : Yitzhak
Rabin and Mahatma Gandhi
Dr. Koenraad Elst
When Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak
Rabin was murdered in protest against his peace efforts, many parallels were
offered by commentators, most frequently with the Egyptian President Anwar
al-Sadat, but also with Indian Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi and Rajiv
Gandhi. However, if we look for parallels in India, the closest parallel is
not with these Government leaders. Indira and Rajiv were killed not for any
peace efforts but for their military actions: against the Khalistani
separatists and against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, respectively.
Unlike Rabin and Sadat, they were not killed by radical members of their own
community, but by Sikh bodyguards and by a female Christian Tamil suicide
bomber, respectively.
Mahatma Gandhi, by contrast, was killed for the very same reason as Yitzhak
Rabin: he had conceded "land for peace". When the Great Calcutta Killing of
1946 made clear that the forces bent on creating a separate state of
Pakistan would stop at nothing to achieve their goal, Mahatma Gandhi and
most Congress leaders were intimidated into accepting that the Partition of
India was the lesser evil, the only alternative being bloodshed of (what we
now would call) the Yugoslav type, but on a much larger scale. So, they
conceded that against which they had been fighting and scheming for the past
decade: the division of India into a theocratic Pakistan and a pluralistic
remainder-India.
The murderer's motives
Like Rabin, Mahatma Gandhi was murdered by a diehard belonging to his own
community. Like Rabin for the Jewish state, Gandhi had rendered sterling
services to Hindu society, which commanded his first and foremost loyalty.
Rabin's murderer had been a great admirer of Rabin in his earlier phase,
viz. as the general who conquered much of what are now called the "oocupied
territories". Gandhi's murderer, Nathuram Godse, had been a follower of
Gandhi in many respects, e.g. he was very active in organizing inter-caste
activities involving the Untouchables. But he had come to decide that in
1947-48, like Rabin in recent years, the Mahatma had betrayed everything he
had stood for. Indeed, Gandhi had declared that Pakistan would only be
created "over my dead body", but when the hour came, the champion of fasts
unto death did not try this pressure tactic to force Mohammed Ali Jinnah,
leader of the Pakistan movement, to abandon his demand for Partition.
Millions of people, mostly Hindus and Sikhs in West Panjab and East Bengal,
felt confident that Partition would not take place because the Mahatma gave
them that assurance; and they felt betrayed when he threw them to the
wolves.
Nathuram Godse worked in the relief operations for Hindu-Sikh refugees from
Pakistan, many of whom had been raped or maimed or had lost relatives, and
he held Gandhi responsible for their plight on two counts. Firstly, Gandhi
could have prevented Partition, or at least staked his life in an attempt to
do so; this he failed to do, probably because he knew that Jinnah would not
give in. This failure also cast a shadow over the earlier occasions when he
had staked his life to pressure people into doing his bidding: it now seemed
that he had only used this tactic with people who could be counted upon to
give in, so that there had never been any real risk of having to fast unto
actual death.
Secondly, even after conceding Partition, a lot of bloodshed could have been
averted by means of an orderly exchange of population, as advocated by the
lucid and realistic Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, free India's first Law Minister: all
Muslims to Pakistan, all non-Muslims to India. At the time, neutral British
troops were still around to oversee such an orderly migration, and the
psychological climate was ready for this lesser-evil solution. Instead,
Gandhi and his appointee as Congress leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, refused to
countenance this bloodless solution out of attachment to the
multiculturalist ideal. The result was that a spontaneous partial exchange
of population took place anyway, but under much worse circumstances: nearly
a million people were killed. For an apostle of non-violence, this was
indeed a disappointing fin-de-carri?re.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can only conclude that this second
criticism is entirely justified. In India, the Hindu-Muslim riots which were
a regular feature of pre-Independence India have resumed (though they have
abated somewhat after the 1992 Ayodhya demolition and the subsequent riot
wave). In Pakistan, the situation is much worse: the non-Muslim minorities
are being terrorized and squeezed out, and in 1971, the Pakistani army
killed perhaps as many as two million Hindus in East Bengal, the biggest
genocide after World War 2. In total, more than three million people (only
counting the mortal victims, not the far more numerous refugees) would have
been saved if the Indian leaders in 1947 had had the wisdom to settle for
the lesser evil of an exchange of population.
By contrast, the first criticism, the one uppermost in Godse's mind, is less
justified. It is unfair to blame the Mahatma for the Partition, considering
that most other Congress leaders had endorsed the very policies which had
led to the Partition, along with the Mahatma or even before his rise to
power (e.g. the 1916 Lucknow Pact signed by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, which
conceded the principle of communal electorates). The Mahatma's failure was
in fact the failure of Hindu society as a whole. But in the charged
post-Partition atmosphere, he was made to bear most of the responsibility,
and forgotten were the sterling services he had rendered to his people.
The final straw after which Godse "could not tolerate this man to live any
longer", was Gandhi's "fast unto death" to force the Indian Government to
pay 550 million Rupees to Pakistan, and to force the Hindu and Sikh refugees
in Delhi to vacate the abandoned mosques and Muslim homes where they had
found shelter (this was mid-winter 1947-48, temperature close to freezing).
The money was Pakistan's fair share of British India's treasury, but it was
nonetheless a strange and unique event to see one country pay such a sum of
money to a country which had just invaded it: Pakistani troops were
occupying a large part of Kashmir (which had by then legally acceded to
India), where they exterminated the entire non-Muslim population. This moral
statement, that certain fairness standards are to be maintained even in
wartime, was too much for Godse and a few companions. On 30 January 1948, he
shot the Mahatma at the beginning of his evening prayer-meeting in Birla
House, Delhi.
Reaction of the public
Both Rabin's and Gandhi's murderers represented an informal group or
"conspiracy", which in both cases included the murderer's brother.
Nathuram's brother, Gopal Godse, is still alive and, like Rabin's murderer,
is still unrepentant: every year on the anniversary of the day when Nathuram
was hanged (15 November 1949), he and other Nathuram fans gather at the
family house in Pune to commemorate "Nathuram Godse's martyrdom".
After the murder, Nathuram also enjoyed a certain popularity among the
refugees, particularly the women, who had borne the brunt of the Partition
atrocities. But on the whole, the population was angry with him, just like
most Israelis are with Rabin's murderer and his supporters. There is,
however, an important difference between the two murders in the reaction of
the masses.
In Israel, no revenge has been wrought upon the Jewish fundamentalists by
Rabin supporters: Jews kept their cool and refused to compound this one
inter-Jewish murder with a wave of revenge murders. In India, by contrast,
the murder of the Mahatma was followed by a wave of violence against the
Hindu Mahasabha, the party to which Godse belonged, even though the judicial
enquiry later revealed that the party as such had not been involved in the
conspiracy. Worse, numerous people were molested and some of them killed by
Gandhi supporters for no other crime than belonging to the same (Chitpavan
Brahmin) caste as Godse, a wave of violence comparable to the 1984 anti-Sikh
violence in Delhi by Congress activists after Indira's murder.
Political consequences
It is too early to compare the long-term political fall-out of the two
murders. My hunch is that after the dust has settled, Rabin's murder will
have only a limited effect on Israeli policy: Israeli policy-makers
including Rabin have always been led by sobre calculations of national
interest, sometimes justifying war and sometimes encouraging the "peace
process". The anger of public opinion against Jewish fundamentalists will
not fundamentally alter this approach, most of all because public opinion
itself is not tempted to go to the opposite extreme, viz. to abandon all
concerns for national security in favour of a purely moralistic and
pacifistic stand. In India, by contrast, policy is to a large extent
dictated by the contrived hysteria generated by the chattering classes in
their sloganeering sessions (e.g. the "anti-imperialism" and "peace" slogans
of the 1950s providing the music to Nehru's foolish foreign policy, which
sacrificed Tibet and invited a Chinese invasion), and the masses are easily
swayed from one extreme to another. This way, a single murder changed
India's political landscape completely.
First of all, it prevented the rise to prominence of the Hindu Mahasabha and
other pro-Hindu forces (including the National Volunteer Association or RSS,
which was not involved in the murder but got banned nonetheless). After
Congress had betrayed its own 1946 election promise of not allowing the
Partition of the Motherland, the stage was set for a breakthrough of the
Hindu parties; after the murder, they were marginalized and their
breakthrough got postponed until 1989. Even the millions of refugees from
Pakistan did not join them in sizable numbers (e.g. in West Bengal they
became the backbone of the Communist Party, eventhough the latter had
supported the Partition).
Secondly, and ironically, the murder revived the Mahatma's own fortunes. It
is insufficiently realized today that just after the Partition, Gandhi was
discredited and demoralized. He regained some credibility after his last
"fast unto death" managed to make Hindu and Sikh refugees vacate Muslim
property in Delhi, a feat which cooled communal tempers. But this could not
remove the blot of the unprevented Partition from his name. It was his
martyrdom which assured his place of honour in history.
The most important political effect of the Mahatma's murder for people who
genuinely stand by the Gandhian ideals, was that it immensely strengthened
the power position of Jawaharlal Nehru. Prime Minister Nehru and his
westernized and Soviet-oriented clique killed Gandhiji a second time, viz.
by thoroughly negating every single element in his vision of what free India
should be like. They were implacable enemies of everything which Mahatma
Gandhi had held dear: Hinduism of course, and religion in general, but also
village autonomy, economic decentralization, simplicity of lifestyle,
emphasis on personal morals rather than on socio-political structures,
character-building rather than materialist consumerism, and grass-roots
solutions for India's specific problems.
Gandhi's major claim to fame was that he, almost alone among the freedom
leaders in the entire colonized world, had sought and developed policies and
strategies rooted in native culture rather than borrowed from Western models
(nationalism, socialism etc.); of this nativist orientation, nothing was
retained in Nehru's politics. Thus, the Indian Constitution which was
approved two years after Gandhi's death, was essentially an adaptation of
the 1935 colonial Government of India Act; its format and philosophy
contains almost no trace of specifically Indian cultural achievements and
values. In this respect, the Hindu activists who opposed Gandhi's acceptance
of Pakistan were much closer to him (and still are, cfr. the Gandhian
writings of the late Ram Swarup and of Dattopant Thengadi), but the effect
of the murder was that the only movement which might have implemented many
of Gandhiji's projects was politically marginalized for decades.
This way, Gandhiji's death brought the death of Gandhism as a political
factor in India. It strengthened the position of people who used his name
but were objectively the worst enemies of everything he had stood for.
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