In the just-concluded urban civic body elections in Tamil Nadu, one candidate who won stands out. She is Uma Anandan, who has won from Ward 134, West Mambalam, in Chennai. It is one of the 200 wards in the single largest municipal corporation in the state. 
What makes her election extremely noteworthy is that she is the only BJP candidate who won the election in Chennai which was, otherwise, swept by the DMK-led alliance, including the Congress and the Left parties.

People in Chennai know that the West Mambalam area was one of the worst-hit, water-logged areas in the city in last year’s flood. She, therefore, had the benefit of the anti-incumbency feelings in the constituency.

Uma Anandan had become infamous in the state when she justified the killing of Mahatma Gandhi by Nathuram Vinayak Godse. Not only that, she also justified the caste system, while asserting the superiority of Brahmins. She accused the Muslims and Christians of being violent. Her only regret was that the father of the nation was not killed earlier.

Yet, she was able to win the seat by a comfortable margin. One only has to remember that Tamil Nadu is the state where anti-brahmanism was the credo of Dravidian parties till Jayalalithaa, who was herself a Brahmin, captured the imagination of the AIADMK cadres and defeated the DMK in successive elections.

It is pointless to blame the Chennai lady when she was fielded by the party which rules the country. Straws in the wind suggest that Godse, not Gandhi, is the flavour of the season, though Prime Minister Narendra Modi religiously goes to the Raj Ghat to pay floral tributes, come October 2 and January 30. 

In Modi’s own Gujarat, which also produced Gandhi, a recent speech competition held for the students of Classes V to VIII at a private school in Valsad shocked the conscience of the nation. 

The students were given three subjects, approved by the Valsad district officials and they were: “I like the flying bird in the sky”, “I will become a scientist but will not go to the USA” and “Nathuram Godse: My ideal or hero”. A student who spoke on the third subject was declared the winner and given the prize. 

When it became a controversy, the youth development officer of the district, Ms Mita Gavli, was placed under suspension for “lack of oversight”. Gandhi’s great grandson Tushar Gandhi lamented the fact that murderers were becoming heroes in the country.

Recently, another Godse-lover captured the headlines in the media. That is when Prof. Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit was appointed vice-chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University. She was born in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, in the erstwhile USSR and she studied at Presidency College in Chennai.

Those who wanted to know what kind of a person she was were shocked to find her old tweets praising Godse and supporting all the controversial moves of the Modi government, including the citizenship law and the now-junked farm laws. It was also found that a disciplinary action was taken against her. In other words, she was not fit for the job.

When her old tweets began to be retweeted by her followers, she did one of the smartest things that she ever did — she removed her Twitter handle. Whatever the people may say about her love for Godse, the fact remains that it was this feature that endeared her to the Modi dispensation.

This raises the question — is Gandhi losing his appeal in India? Books on Godse like ‘Why Godse Killed Gandhi’ are well-stocked in the bookshops in Delhi where Gandhi’s autobiography ‘My Experiments with Truth’ is rare to be found. Why is that so?

The Sangh Parivar, of which the RSS is the fountainhead, believes in robust Hindutva. Its philosophy is well-articulated in the works of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Guruji Golwalkar. They see India as the land of Hindus where Muslims and Christians can stay on sufferance. 

They had no liking for Gandhi who preached non-violence, an idea he borrowed from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. Another book which greatly influenced Gandhi was Russian writer Leo Tolstoy’s ‘The Kingdom of God is Within You’. It was banned in Russia and Germany because it was considered both anti-church and anti-state. 

The book “espouses a commitment to Jesus's message of turning the other cheek. So, the simplest way to understand the Kingdom of God is the realm where Jesus Christ reigns as King and God's authority is supreme. This Kingdom exists here and now in the lives and hearts of the redeemed, as well as in perfection and fullness in the future”. 

Gandhi was greatly influenced by this book. He was also in correspondence with the Russian writer. Gandhi’s maiden biography was written by the missionary Joseph Doke with whom he had close relations. In the book, Doke mentions that Gandhi had confided to him that the idea for his passive resistance movement was drawn from the Bible.

On the other hand, the Sangh Parivar draws its inspiration from the teachings of Krishna, as depicted in the Mahabharata in which everyone of consequence among the Kauravas like Dronacharya, Karna and Duryodhana was killed through deceit.

Those who are familiar with the life story of Tilak know only too well how he used quotations from the Gita to incite violence which resulted in a trial. It was Tilak who popularised the Ganapati worship in Maharashtra.

The point is that the basic philosophy of the Sangh Parivar is at variance with that of Gandhi. Let me quote a few lines from journalist Vivek Shukla’s book Gandhi’s Delhi:

“Tushar Gandhi, great-grandson of Gandhi, has written ‘Let’s Kill Gandhi: A Chronicle of His Last Days, the Conspiracy’. In his book, he blames Brahmins for assassinating Bapu. Critics have claimed that the book defames all Brahmins, though Tushar Gandhi has stressed that his claims relate only to ‘a certain group of Brahmins from Pune who were continuously attempting on the life of my great grandfather’ rather than to Brahmins in general”.

Gandhi was not a twice-born Brahmin. He was by caste, a Vaishya. Small wonder that when Gandhi sought an appointment with the head of the Brahmin family which controlled the famous Shiva temple at Vaikom in Kerala, he was not allowed inside the house. Gandhi had to sit in the courtyard while Namboothiri sat inside the house.

Gandhi had gone there to protest against the practice of not letting the lower caste people walk on the outer roads surrounding the temple. The protesters were not demanding access to the temple for the Scheduled Caste people. They wanted only their civic rights to be established.

In the famous encounter between the Brahmin and Gandhi, the latter tells him about the principle of equality that bound everyone with everyone. To this, the Brahmin asks Gandhi a pointed question: Do you believe in Varnashrama-dharma, the divine classification of man?

Gandhi says “yes”, surrendering his right to speak about equality that guides human life. The point is that while being an orthodox Hindu, Gandhi was against caste-based discrimination. Of course, his use of the term Harijan for the Scheduled Castes was found to be unacceptable for it was condescending. 

Gandhi’s selective use of Hinduism like the concept of Ram Rajya as the ideal of statecraft did not appeal to the Sangh Parivar. However, he wielded considerable influence on the Indian public. Gandhi was not a rabble-rouser like Hitler but when he spoke in a faltering style, people listened to him in rapt attention.

True, the Sangh Parivar was not strong at that time. But those who believed that when India became an independent nation, it should be a Hindu nation were in sizable strength even in the Congress party. Alas, the influence Gandhi and his conscience-keeper Jawaharlal Nehru had on the Congress cadres was such that they could not question the two.

They believed that when Pakistan was formed on the basis of religion, they missed an opportunity to declare India a theocratic state. Alas, they could not do much as Gandhi and Nehru continued to be the lodestars of the Congress.

And when Gandhi launched his last fast, among others, to demand that India pay Rs 55 crore to Pakistan as agreed during the Partition talks, those behind Godse decided to do away with Gandhi.

Godse’s original plan was to shoot Gandhi and make good his escape. He stayed at Marina Hotel, owned by Haji Hafiz Mohammad Ismail Japanwala and his brother Haji Mohammad Ibrahim Japanwala, one of the oldest Muslim families of Delhi. He wore a green-tinged shirt.

Had Godse succeeded in his bid to escape, there would have been conjectures about a green shirted-man who stayed in a Muslim hotel with disastrous consequences for the nation. The killing shocked the whole nation.

The first news bulletin of All India Radio specifically mentioned that the killer was not a Muslim. Yet, nearly 45 Muslims were killed in various parts of the country. By then the news had reached all corners of the country by word of mouth. 

A study found that it took less than six minutes for the news to reach all. Neither before nor after has Delhi seen such a massive turnout of people to say adieu to Gandhi. Of course, there were people like the BJP leader in Chennai and the VC of JNU at that time also.

Poet and lyricist ONV Kurup has in his autobiography narrates how he saw a rich, aristocratic family in Thiruvananthapuram celebrating the assassination of Gandhi by distributing sweets to whoever passed by their house hours after Godse shot Gandhi.

The assassination of Gandhi and the resultant ban on the RSS made the Sangh Parivar suspicious in the eye of the common people. For once, the Hindutva movement suffered a huge setback. It had to wait till LK Advani used Ayodhya to capture the imagination of the people. 

The Hindutva movement got the final push when the Parivar joined hands with the likes of Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal to press for Lok Pal by making wild allegations against the Congress government, none of which could stand judicial scrutiny.

Unfortunately for the Parivar, something happened in the rest of the world. Gandhi’s popularity increased by leaps and bounds in foreign countries. When I visited Mongolia, my guide took me to the university there to show me something. It was a small statue of Mahatma Gandhi. 

Once American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr and his wife Coretta Scott King visited India. They were taken to the Raj Ghat where they said that they came to India not as tourists but as pilgrims. 

After Martin Luther King’s assassination, his wife erected a memorial for him at Atlanta where Gandhi’s presence is as imposing or inspiring as the black American leader’s is. There is no major world capital where either a statue of Gandhi or a road or street named after him is not present.

Gandhi’s collected works number 100 volumes. He has written extensively on peace, communal harmony, equality, non-violence, fraternity and such noble subjects. Yet, Modi found only his stress on toilet cleanliness as worthy of popularisation. 

The BJP has ministers, MPs, MLAs and municipal councillors who believe that Godse did the right thing to finish Gandhi. Modi is a dyed-in-the-wool RSS man but he is also a Gujarati like Gandhi. He knows that he cannot speak against Gandhi except at the cost of his popularity, not only in Gujarat but all over the world.

This does not mean that the project to eulogise Godse, build temples for him and perpetuate his memory has been abandoned. Just as efforts are on to promote the author of Hindutva Savarkar as the final replacement for Gandhi.

It is against this backdrop that the recent destruction of the Gandhi statue erected on the occasion of the centenary of the Champaran satyagraha in Bihar should be seen. When the atmosphere of hatred is created, acts of hatred become the order of the day.

ajphilip@gmail.com