“Why I Assassinated Mahatma Gandhi by Nathuram Godse”

One-sided knowledge is never correct for someone to be judged and that is the main reason I wanted to read this book and trust me, I have not been disappointed. If you've read books about Gandhiji, I would recommend you to read this book for a COMPLETE KNOWLEDGE and why did the "Great Man" have to die in the hands of a "bloody" murderer. I am a firm believer that History always has three sides to it.

One’s the popular side which is taught, preached, and repeated to us throughout our lives. The second is the one that's subsided to a form that looks negligible and the third is the actual truth. We cannot go back in time and see what the truth is but certainly we should be aware of these subsided stories and let our intelligence and commonsense decide about what the facts actually might be. I would want to foresee an India where a page is dedicated to Mr. Godse mentioning the reason for his decision to kill the father of our nation. A hypocritically free society is the need of the hour.

This book is based on Nathuram Godse’s statement given in the Mahatma Gandhi murder case. If you idolize Gandhi and think of him as the flag barrier of the Indian independence movement then you really need to read this book. “Why I assassinated Gandhi” or should I say “Why my act of assassinating Gandhi is justified?” This book, edited by Virendra Mehra, presents Godse as the ultimate Hindu hero fighting against ‘religious fanatics’. You know who those fanatics are, right?! And I’m not using this term. Mehra in his book referred to Indian Muslims as ‘religious fanatics. Not one Muslim, not two, but the whole community of them!

Nathuram Godse was an orthodox Hindu who couldn’t bear Gandhi’s so-called favoritism towards the Muslim community. Gandhi, being an influential personality had a say in all the political matters of the community. According to people like Godse, Gandhi’s biased opinions towards Muslims were detrimental to the Hindu community. Since there was no other way to end this, Nathuram committed the horrendous crime of killing Gandhi. This book, within 200 pages tries to justify his actions. I think just like Nathuram and other members of RSS, the editor of this book is also an orthodox Hindu who is a victim of xenophobia. His usage of words like ‘religious fanatics’ and ‘fundamentalists’ to define an entire community of people following a particular religion was absurd.

He calls violent acts done by Muslims as ‘unacceptable’ but ‘a mere retaliation’ when the same thing is done by Hindus. I just lost my cool at the point when Godse writes in his statement that the Indian government should use violent force against Indian Muslims to take revenge for our Hindu brothers in Pakistan. The book points out many flaws in Gandhi but no matter what he did, taking someone’s life can never be justified. After all, Gandhi was a human being too. The only good thing that I found in this book is the epic vocabulary that the writer has used. This book is good to learn new words. But apart from that, it is written with a single viewpoint, that of an orthodox Hindu murderer. If you want to read this book, keep your mind open and your analytical thinking skills intact. Don’t fall prey to the writer’s fancy words.

---