Looking back

January 30 –An ‘Inauspicious Day’
Sankar Ray

History repeats, if we accept Marx, 'first as a tragedy, the second time as farce' (the opening paragraph of Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte). Post-Marx history decades got him right several times. One of them was the assassination of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on 30 January 1948, exactly 15 years after Adolf Hitler had moved into the shoes of Kurt von Schleicher to become the Chancellor of Germany in front of the hopeless, old and decrepit German President, Paul von Hinden-burg. The Nazi supremo had taken the oath like a scorpion under camouflage, saying ostentatiously "I will employ my strength for the welfare of the German people, protect the Constitution and laws of the German people, conscientiously discharge the duties imposed on me, and conduct my affairs of office impartially and with justice to everyone." But Hitler's close coterie, knew what the Fuehrer had in mind. His minister for propaganda. Dr Paul Joseph Goebbles, scribbled in his diary on the same day "It is almost like a dream—a fairytale. The new Reich has been born. Fourteen years of work have been crowned with victory. The German revolution has begun!"

Germany was, reeling under Great Depression, thanks to bunch of indecisive and self-serving legislators. The state and governance screeched to a halt, a complete standstill. The people were without jobs, without food, traumatized under a penumbra of uncertainty and desperate for relief. The Nazi revolution, one of the most abominable chapter in the history of mankind had ushered in cashing in on the distressed economy, annihilated everything that had the slightest semblance of libertarianism.

The nascent Indian republic was stupefied at the bloody incident on 30 January at the Birla House in New Delhi, where the Father of the Nation embraced martyrdom for his uncompromising war for communal harmony. The content of tragedy in the repeat of history was metaphorical as the situation was ripe for another Hitler to emerge in New Delhi. Nor did the toughs of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh—Indian counterpart of Hitler's private army, the Sturm Abteilung—come to greet a teary-eyed Nathuram, unmistakably as fanatic as the Nazis. The RSS and shakhas around had little faith in the new democratic republic which was pushing ahead to adopt a new Constitution.

The assassin, Nathuram Godse, was a devout admirer of the Third Reich and a Hindu communalist and whatever he did on that fateful day was out of his abiding faith in the Aryan superiority, the common bond between the brass of Sangh Parivar and the Nazi overlords. The inspirational outfit for the killing of Gandhiji was the RSS, which was openly committed to Fascism ideologically. Although the RSS biggies and their apologists often denied Nathuram's connection with the RSS, Godse's brother and one of the accused and convicted in the assassination case, Gopal Godse, exposed the mask of RSS on this issue in his narrative ‘Why I Assassinated Mahatma Gandhi’ (1993) that Nathuram had to say he had a disconnect with the RSS as "Golwalker and the RSS were in a lot of trouble after the murder of Gandhi. But he did not leave the RSS." He snapped fingers at the former BJP president Lal Kishinchand Advani for 'cowardice' in the latter's denial of Nathuram's membership of the RSS at the time of the murder.

Godse's idol was the RSS Sarsanghchalak Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar who infamously wrote in his ‘We or Our Nation Defined’ (1938 edition), "German national pride has now become the topic of the day. To keep up purity of the nation and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races, the Jews. National pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into a united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by." (p.37)

However, the possibility of both the ascension of Hitler and Nazism and assassination of Gandhiji could be nipped in the bud. Comintern scholar Sobhanlal Dutta Gupta, formerly Surendranath Banerjee chair of political science at the University of Calcutta, based on his research at the Comintern Archive (declassified by the erstwhile Communist Party of Soviet Union in its terminal years) in Moscow found that Josef Stalin invented the concept 'social fascism' (not in the lexicon of Lenin, let alone Marx or Engels) to prevent the united front of the Communist Party of Germany with the Socialist Party of Germany. But for this deadly error, the dream of Fuehrer remained unfulfilled (Sobhanlal Dutta Gupta : Comintern and the Destiny of Indian Communism 1919-1943.) Nikolai Bukharin, Dr Dutta Gupta wrote, contested the formulation of 'social fascism' and resisted the inclusion of the same in Draft Programme at the Sixth Congress of the Communist International (Comintern). The impact of Stalin's 'Class vs Class' theory, Dr Dutta Gupta, rightly states—agreed by most of the Marx scholars—set the ground-shift away from the 'anti-imperialist united front... The impact of this life was tragic, if not brutal. In India it led to disaster". Communist Party of Germany (KPD) chief Ernst Thaelman who parroted Stalin to refute Trotsky who took up cudgels for communist-socialist united front against Hitler, was executed within a couple of years after Hitler's assumption of power.

The murder of Gandhiji might be averted had the Prime Minister of United Provinces (later Uttar Pradesh) Govind Ballabh Pant responded positively to the then chief secretary of the state Rajeshwar Dayal, much later secretary, external affairs. The ICS officer seized few trunks of documents through a very brave and efficient officer, BBL Jaitley, then DIGP, western range, that "revealed incontrovertible evidence of a dastardly conspiracy to create a communal holocaust throughout the western districts". Dayal wrote in his autobiography A Life of Our Times (1998), "I must record an episode of a very grave nature when the procrastination and indecision of the UP Cabinet led to dire consequences. When communal tension was still at fever-pitch, BBL Jaitley arrived at my house in great secrecy. He was accompanied by two of his officers who brought with them two large steel trunks securely locked. The trunks were crammed with blueprints of great accuracy and professionalism of every town and village in that vast area, prominently marking out the Muslim localities and habitations. There were also detailed instructions regarding access to the various locations, and other matters which amply revealed their sinister purport". The entire blue print was scripted "under the direction and supervision of the supremo of the organisation himself (Golwalkar- SR) .Both Jaitley and I pressed for the immediate arrest of the prime accused, Shri Golwalkar, who was still in the area."

But Pant turned down the formidable suggestion . The intrepid ICS officer blasted Pant.. "Pantji could not but accept the evidence of his eyes and ears and expressed deep concern. But instead of agreeing to the immediate arrest of the ring leader as we had hoped, and as Rafi Ahmed Kidwai would have done, he asked for the matter to be placed for consideration by the Cabinet at its next meeting. It was no doubt a matter of political delicacy as the roots of the RSS had gone deep into the body politic. There were also other political compulsions as RSS sympathisers, both covert and overt, were to be found in the Congress party itself and even in the Cabinet." But for acceptance of Dayal's advice, the saffron lobby was inspired to go ahead with its obscurantist politics and at its turning point, Gandhiji was cowardly gunned down.

Pant was crowned with the Bharat Ratna award during the Nehru period.

The 30th of January is an inauspicious day in the history for two centuries. The precious library of Thomas Jefferson, author of the US Declaration of Independence, with over 1500 rare books were burnt on this day in 1815, nearly seven decades after his death. The King Charles was beheaded in 1649 at the Charing Cross and the Tet Offensive against the Vietcong forces by the US Army began in 1968 on 30 January. The Third Reich ordered the extermirfation of European Jews on the same date in 1939 and six million Jews were killed.

Frontier
Vol. 45, No. 34, Mar 3-9, 2013

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