Historical records expose the lie that Nathuram Godse left the RSS
On this day in 1948, Nathuram Godse, the Hindu-supremacist fanatic, killed Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh could not muster the courage to acknowledge Gandhi’s assassin as one of its own. The first official reaction of the RSS was an outright denial of its association with Godse in any form and at any point of time. Regardless, Godse has continued to hold pride of place in the imagination of Hindutva followers, despite the RSS’s attempts to distance itself from him. Prominent office-bearers with affiliations to the Sangh and its political arm, the Bharatiya Janata Party, have often expressed appreciation for Godse. With a former RSS pracharak—full-time worker—Narendra Modi, as the prime minister since 2014, the BJP’s leaders are embracing Godse more openly. The BJP MPs Sakshi Maharaj and Pragya Singh Thakur, the latter an accused in the 2008 Malegaon blasts, have praised Godse multiple times. The BJP government of Uttar Pradesh had proposed renaming the Meerut district to “Pandit Nathuram Godse Nagar.”
Even as Godse-worship has gone mainstream, the RSS has stayed silent for a very practical reason: to avoid being implicated in the assassination of the man called the father of the nation. Several historical documents that Dhirendra K Jha, a contributing writer at The Caravan, discovered during his research on Godse for our January 2020 cover story, confirm that Gandhi’s assassin never gave up his membership of the RSS. A statement Godse gave in March 1948 seems to have been ignored by generations of academics and journalists—perhaps due to the fact that it is only available in its entirety in Marathi. “Once again I began to take up the work of Hindu Mahasabha,” the statement says. “Simultaneously, I remained active in Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.” Read Jha’s entire essay here..
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How a CIA man helped the RSS come out of Godse’s shadow
Just before the RSS’s links with Godse could become an issue in the first Indian general election, the researcher JA Curran, based in the United States, wrote an account of the organisation that de-hyphenated it from the assassin of Gandhi. No one seemed to suspect that he was working at the behest of the US Central Intelligence Agency. On the whole, his book, Militant Hinduism in Indian Politics: A Study of the RSS, succeeded in depicting Godse in exactly the manner the Sangh desired. Read Jha’s findings in this essay from March 2024.
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Gandhi’s Assassin. By Dhirendra K Jha
The RSS Does Not Exist – on paper
The Supreme Court, Gandhi and the RSS
Calicut professor booked for Facebook post praising Godse. (Withdraw the case)
V.D. Savarkar and Gandhi’s murder
Modi says Congress committed ‘sin’ of partition / The Non-politics of the RSS
Delhi Police Archive on RSS activity in October-December 1947
Professor’s Harassment by ABVP Shows Near-Complete Takeover of Universities by RSS-BJP
How the RSS, Golwalkar & Hindu Mahasabha glorified caste: Devanur Mahadevan
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: The limits of the Hindu vs Hindutvavadi debate
Partha Banerjee: An insider’s book on the RSS
The RSS and Modi – Two Articles
The sinking of Joshimath and the commercialisation of sacredness
Anand K. Sahay: The idea behind capturing power in any kind of way: fair or foul
After the truth-shower 