Avijit Pathak
Sociologist
QUITE often, I feel that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s assassination was inevitable because a communally charged/violent Indian society was not ready to live with the Mahatma’s conscience — his lifelong quest for spiritualised politics, and Swaraj as decentralisation of power; or his longing for a simple and ecologically sustainable mode of living. In a way, Nathuram Godse symbolised what seemed to be more ‘practical’ to many — the centrality of brute force, the militaristic dream of modern nationalism, and the aggression of ‘development’. In a way, it was necessary to annihilate Gandhi’s utopias. Gandhi was an embarrassment for the power-hungry political class, and the gang of contractors, traders and the emergent elite.