Thread by @autumnshade

Dhirendra Jha's "#Gandhi's Assassin: The Making of Nathuram Godse and His Idea of India". A thread on a must-read book:
Today, 74 years ago, Mohandas K Gandhi was shot down in cold blood by Nathuram Godse while walking to his evening prayer meeting at Birla House in Delhi. (1/18)

Godse thought he'd get a reaction of mass support like the INA undertrials did; instead the country was enraged, and RSS men had to run for their lives. Distressed crowds tried to set on fire Savarkar Sadan in Mumbai and the Nagpur residence of RSS supremo MS Gowalkar. (2/18)

It was quite different from what Godse had in mind – which tells you a lot about his mind.
Dhirendra Jha, a colleague at Vinod Mehta's The Pioneer in the early 90s, has written a fascinating and lucid account of not just the conspiracy, the assassination, and the trial,... (3/18)

where at a late stage Savarkar's lawyers drafted a statement for Godse to read out as his own, in impeccable English, to portray the assassination as a “lone wolf” act and not a conspiracy (the judges were not fooled); but also the build-up over Godse's life that... (4/18)

led him to this heinous act, and the radical milieu he existed in. This milieu began when his idol, role model and guru VD Savarkar was released from the Cellular Jail in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands in 1924, after 11 years of incarceration instead of the sentenced 50... (5/18)

years; it came after his third mercy petition to the British in which he promised to abhor violence.
Savarkar, after his imprisonment, was a man whose priority was self-preservation and not sacrifice for the nation. He convinced Godse not to participate in the 1930 Salt... (6/18)

Satyagraha led by Gandhiji. It was the moment when Gandhiji was permanently demonised in Godse's thinking. In fact, when Godse set out with ND Apte for the first assassination attempt of Gandhiji (on 20 January 1948), the first person they went and met was Savarkar. (7/18)

Yet Savarkar covered his tracks well, and after leaving prison made it a habit to be careful and stay in the shadows, while leaving no footprints. No wonder he was the only accused in the trial after Gandhiji's murder who was found not guilty – for insufficient evidence. (8/18)

Of late there's been a white-washing of Savarkar's story. Besides the current top political leadership's staged homage to him, biographies have been published that, though glossy, lack in any scholarship besides a regurgitation of Savarkar's own writings about himself. (9/18)

Godse's statement, despite its obvious falsehoods and cover-ups, and the fact that it came late in the trial, long after Godse's own diary/account book was mined for evidence of the conspirators, has also been rehashed of late to sanitise the conspiracy aspect,... (10/18)

particularly the RSS as Puppet Master over the conspirators. Jha has set out to correct the record with superior research and multiple sources.
One of the most important is Godse's pretrial statement of March 1948, eight weeks before the statement prepared for him and... (11/18)

read out during the trial. Hindutva apologists conveniently ignore this statement, damning as it is to the RSS, the Hindu Mahasabha and to Savarkar himself. Jha also makes comprehensive use of intelligence reports from the Raj and after. Then there is the documentation... (12/18)

at half a dozen institutions like the National Archives of India and the Mumbai Marathi Grantha Sangrahalaya. Jha has collected oral histories from Sumanbhai, Shrinivas D Acharya, Bapursaheb Pujari and Vishwanath Dattatreya Godse.
The RSS has for decades tried to claim... (13/18)

that Godse was not a member when it separated from the Hindu Mahasabha. Yet Godse continued to lead the RSS shakhas in Poona, and when he set up the Hindu Rashtra Dal he did so with RSS cadres among others. The RSS, Jha shows us, was always careful to camouflage its... (14/18)

records and membership, particularly with members like Godse who openly talked of setting up private militias based on those of the 1930s European fascists. Yet in substance, Godse was very much a part of the same universe. This book shows us how he remained an RSS... (15/18)

man to the end, literally: he recited the “RSS prayer” the evening before his exceution.
From the time Savarkar was released (but confined to Ratnagiri), Godse was like his mentor less anti-British and overwhelmingly anti-Muslim. On January 31, 1948, when the Mumbai... (16/18)

CID reached Savarkar Sadan, Savarkar asked if they had come to arrest him. The Bombay Home Minister, Morarji Desai, did not give permission. Ultimately, Savarkar had to stand trial with the men he had inspired and led to commit the assassination that he wanted committed. (17/18)

Though he sat next to Godse, not once did he look at him and just “Sat in his char, a sphinx sculpted in stone”. As Jha tells us: “Godse worshipped him as a father figure and perhaps this was why Savarkar's aloofness hurt Godse deeply.”

An important read for our times. (18/18)