Nathuram Godse killed Mahatma Gandhi on January 30, 1948, citing two purported reasons. The first was that Gandhi undertook a fast for Rs 55 crore to be paid to Pakistan. This was its remaining share in terms of the division of assets and liabilities of British India after Rs 20 crore had already been paid, but the government of India did not wish to pay further because of the Kashmir-related hostilities.
The charge was a familiar one – Gandhi had been accused by many Hindus of partiality towards Muslims, even as MA Jinnah insisted on seeing him as a Hindu leader. But this accusation missed Gandhi’s deep engagement with Hinduism, which he deeply loved, even as he considered all religions as equal and different paths to the same goal.
Gandhi on Hinduism
Speaking about Arya Samaj leader Swami Shraddhanand’s assassination by a man called Abdul Rashid at the Gauhati Congress of 1926, Gandhi said, “I am a Hindu by birth, and I find peace in the Hindu religion. Whenever peace seemed to elude me, it was in the Hindu religion that I found it. I studied other religions also, and I decided that whatever its defects and drawbacks, Hinduism alone could be the religion for me. That is what I feel and that is why I call myself a Sanatani Hindu.”
He sought to define Hinduism in his earlier days in South Africa, too, underlining in a statement, “Hinduism, in its general spirit, is a religion which everybody would find acceptable. It is essentially an ethical religion. From this point of view, it may be said that all religions are equally true, since there can be no religion divorced from ethics.”
Significantly, Gandhi defended idol worship, which was sometimes seen as a backward practice in colonial times. “It is not necessary for any Hindu to go to the temple to worship (the image of) Ramchandra. But it is for him who cannot contemplate his Rama without looking at his image in a temple. It may be unfortunate, but it is true that his Rama resides in the temple as nowhere else. I would not disturb that simple faith,” he replied to a schoolmaster critical of idol worship in correspondence in March-April, 1933.
He also defended the Hindu belief in reincarnation, saying that so many people being born and passing away proved it. As quoted in Margaret Chatterjee’s book Gandhi’s Religious Thought, he said he would not consider someone who did not believe in reincarnation to be a Hindu.
Ram Rajya
Gandhi also repeatedly used the term “Ram Rajya” as a model for ideal rule and governance. At the third Kathiawar Political Conference held in Bhavnagar on January 8, 1925, Gandhi said that Ram Rajya meant an ideal state for him.
He commended Lord Ram for taking cues from a washerman and abandoning his wife, despite his love for her, “to satisfy his subjects” — a position that would perhaps be deemed politically incorrect. “Rama did not need the very imperfect modern instrument of ascertaining public opinion by counting votes… He knew public opinion by intuition as it were,” Gandhi asserted.
Historian Ravi K Mishra’s paper Gandhi and Religion, published in Gandhi Marg, argues that Ram Rajya was inclusive, and he repeatedly emphasised that it was not something Muslims or Christians should be wary of. He once translated it as the “Kingdom of God on Earth,” Mishra writes. When Gandhi was questioned about whether his Ram Rajya was not Hindu Raj, he said that it was simply a “convenient and expressive phrase” and that if he were addressing people in the Frontier Province, he would use the word “Khudai Raj”.
“My Ram is another name for Khuda or God,” Gandhi said at a prayer meeting in Haimchar, Mishra notes.
Gandhi was wedded to social reform and yet described himself as an orthodox Hindu, which, Mishra writes, was intended to provide legitimacy for reform. Addressing a gathering of Sri Lankan Hindus at Jaffna in 1927, he said, “If orthodox Hinduism means dining or not dining with this or that man, and touching this man and not touching that man or in quarrelling with Mussalmans or Christians, then I am certainly not an orthodox Hindu. But if orthodox Hinduism can mean an incessant search after what Hinduism can possibly be, if orthodox Hinduism can mean an incessant striving to live Hinduism to the best of one’s lights, then I claim to be an orthodox Hindu.”
Gandhi’s belief that all religions were equal made him critical of religious conversion, and he had many exchanges with Christian missionaries on the subject.
When a woman missionary told him that she wanted others to pass through her university because of her partiality towards her alma mater, Gandhi said, “There is my difficulty. Because you adore your mother, you cannot wish that all the rest were your mother’s children.” When the lady said this was a “physical impossibility”, Gandhi quipped that conversion was a “spiritual impossibility”. Mishra argues that Gandhi saw conversion as harmful because of his insistence that all religions were equal.
Many associates of Gandhi became critical of his support for the Khilafat movement of 1919, intended to bring Muslims into the non-cooperation movement, arguing that he had unnecessarily supported a pan-Islamist movement unrelated to the freedom struggle.
“Let Hindus not be frightened by Pan-Islamism. It is not, it need not be, anti-Indian or anti-Hindu. Mussalmans must wish well to every Mussalman state and even assist any such state, if it is undeservedly in peril,” Gandhi responded, adding, “And Hindus, if they are true friends of Mussalmans, cannot but share the latter’s feelings.”
Gandhi was also a worshipper of the cow like many orthodox Hindus, but was against attacks on Muslims to protect the cow. He wrote in his book Hind Swaraj in 1909 that he would plead with a Muslim not to kill a cow, and even lay down his life to save the cow, but not take the life of a fellow being for it. He asserted that the insistence of Hindus led to greater cow killing in retaliation, and it wouldn’t be wrong to say that cow protection societies were “cow-killing societies”.
In opposing the proposal for separate electorates (consisting of only Dalit voters choosing from Dalit candidates) — something that had been demanded by Dr BR Ambedkar and granted by the British via the Communal Award of 1932 — Gandhi was seen as someone trying to keep Hinduism from splitting at the cost of his life.
His fast-unto-death led to the Poona Pact, which replaced separate electorates with reserved constituencies where all voters would vote for candidates from the reserved constituencies — something that made Ambedkar deeply critical of him. This was the first acceptance of reservations as they are implemented today by the nationalist leadership, and the Constitution incorporated it in not just India’s electoral system but also in state education and government jobs.
Yet, as Gandhi toured riot-hit areas after Partition, insisting on Pakistan being given its due share and that Muslims going to Pakistan be brought back and protected rather than giving their houses to Hindu refugees, many began to paint him as anti-Hindu. On January 30, 1948, Godse assassinated him, with “Hey Ram” as Gandhi’s last words.
