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Friday, January 27, 2023

Gandhi’s killer a hero to India’s diehard Hindu nationalists



MM Online:

Gandhi’s killer a hero to India’s diehard Hindu nationalists




In this picture taken on January 25, 2023, Indian author Tushar Gandhi, who is the great-grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, poses for a picture next to a bust of his great-grandfather during an interview at his home in Mumbai. — AFP pic

Friday, 27 Jan 2023 10:46 AM MYT



MEERUT, Jan 27 — Hindu fundamentalist Ashok Sharma has devoted his life to championing the deeds of an Indian “patriot”: not revered independence hero Mahatma Gandhi, but the man who shot him dead.

Sharma is the custodian of a temple dedicated to Nathuram Godse, who on January 30, 1948, gunned down a figure celebrated the world over as an apostle of non-violent struggle.


For generations, the young religious zealot — hanged the following year — was roundly despised as the archvillain of India’s long struggle to free itself from British colonial rule.

But since the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi nearly a decade ago, an alternate history forged in Hindu nationalist ideology has left Sharma no longer a “lone warrior” in worshipping the assassin.


“I was ostracised by everyone, including my family and friends... but today I command respect for being Godse’s disciple,” he told AFP at his shrine in the bustling city of Meerut, a couple of hours from New Delhi by car.


“There is a wind of change in the country and people have understood that Godse was the real patriot and Gandhi a traitor.”

Sharma established his unremarkable temple complex in 2015, a year after Modi took office, after several unsuccessful attempts under previous governments that saw him briefly jailed and his property seized.

Its inauguration was met with outrage and hand-wringing in the press, renewed in 2019 when it marked the anniversary of Gandhi’s death with a staged re-enactment of the killing using an effigy that spurted fake blood.

Now the humble shrine, featuring small ceramic busts of Godse and his chief accomplice Narayan Apte, is visited by droves of people — some out of curiosity, but most to pay their respects.

‘Cannot stop this storm’

Sharma and his followers hold daily prayers in front of the Godse idol, chanting religious sermons that accuse Gandhi of betraying the nation despite his role in mobilising the mass protests that brought India’s independence.

In their view, Gandhi failed to stop Britain’s colony from being partitioned into the separate nations of India and Pakistan, thwarting it from becoming a state governed by ancient Hindu scriptures.

“It is because of Gandhi and his ideology that India was divided and Hindus had to bow before Muslims and outsiders,” said Abhishek Agarwal, like Sharma a member of the century-old radical Hindu Mahasabha group.

Agarwal said that Godse was denigrated by post-independence secular politicians in a conspiracy to suppress Hindu beliefs and impose democracy, a concept he claims is alien to local historical tradition.

“But now Gandhi is exposed and Godse’s word is spreading far and wide. The secular leaders cannot stop this storm and there will be a time when Gandhi’s name will be wiped out from the pious land,” he told AFP.

Patriot or traitor?

Godse was born in a small Indian village in 1910, the son of a postal worker, and at a very young age joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a still-prominent Hindu revivalist outfit whose members conduct paramilitary drills and prayer meetings.

He was 37 years old when he shot Gandhi at point-blank range as the latter emerged from a multi-faith prayer meeting in New Delhi.

At the time, authorities briefly banned the RSS — despite its leaders claiming that Godse left the organisation before the crime — but reversed course not long before the killer was executed alongside an accomplice.

Today, the RSS has continued relevance as the ideological fountainhead of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which it founded to champion Hindu causes in the political realm.

Decades before he became India’s leader, Prime Minister Modi’s first role in public life was as an RSS cadre.

‘Our hate will devour us’

Modi has regularly paid respect to Gandhi as one of the 20th century’s most venerated figures, visiting his spiritual retreat and speaking movingly about his ideals and legacy.

He has refrained from weighing in on efforts by nationalist activists to rehabilitate the legacy of Gandhi’s assassin — to the disappointment of Sharma and his acolytes.

But he has also never explicitly denounced Godse or his ideology, and his government has championed the work of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, an important Hindu ideologue who served as Godse’s mentor and was tried alongside him but acquitted as a co-conspirator in the assassination.

Modi has proved adept at channelling India’s growing tide of Hindu nationalism after coming to power in 2014, invoking the glorious past of India’s majority religion and promising to end its “persecution”.

His departure from the secular values of his predecessors has been watched with dismay by Gandhi’s great-grandson Tushar, an author living in Mumbai.

Tushar told AFP that Godse’s veneration was the direct result of an ideology espoused by Modi’s government that risked sowing the “seeds of our destruction”.

“For too long we’ve been too diplomatic and a bit generous in equating it as nationalism. It’s not nationalism, it is fanaticism,” he said.

“Our hate will devour us. If we have to survive, then somewhere the venom of hate will have to be expunged.” — AFP



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kt comments: Historical parallelism - India and Japan


Asia Times:

DECEMBER 9, 2021


Japan’s new right flexes, snubs US, at Yasukuni shrine

A coalition of conservatives is putting Japanese rearmament and constitutional revision back on the agenda


The Yasukuni Shrine is a symbol of nationalism to many Japanese and one of aggression and abuse among its former and current adversaries. Image: Facebook


TOKYO/SEOUL – Asia’s history wars are heating up again after 99 Japanese lawmakers visited the controversial Yasukuni Shrine on December 7 – the 80th anniversary of the day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor as well as American, British and Dutch forces across the Pacific, an assault that massively expanded World War II.

The visitors included not only lawmakers from the ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), but also two right-wing parties – the Japan Innovation Party and Japan’s National Democratic Party – that are newly empowered after the election for the Lower House of the Diet in November.

The mass visit – Asia Times has been unable to discover a larger recent visit to the shrine by politicians – makes clear how closely these two “opposition” parties are aligned with the LDP. That alignment goes far beyond an attachment to a revisionist, “Lost Cause” narrative about Japan’s Pacific War.

As Asia Times previously reported, the two parties are also bullish on beefing up Japan’s armed forces and revising Japan’s pacifist constitution. This gives the ruling party added impetus in these areas, both of which are contentious among their neighbors – who, predictably, complained about the visit. [...]


9 comments:

  1. Japan seriously needs a major strengthening of its armed forces as it faces a fast rising new Imperialist power in East Asia with aggressive violent designs on others' territory and territorial seas.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Monster you sound like the late Lee Teng-hui , wakakaka - very pro Jap. My late mum used to tremble when she heard Jap language being spoken, even on TV. She dismissed them as "not good people". Never trust Japs with weapons, they want to dominate and oppress others

      Delete
    2. Wakakaka…

      KT u have gotten it wrong!

      This known-thing mfer is actually meant for Japan to be that fast rising new Imperialist power in East Asia with aggressive violent designs on others' territory and territorial seas.

      Subconsciously, that's!

      Delete
    3. Imperial Japan carried out terrible atrocities before and during WW 2.
      But there is almost nobody left alive from that generation.
      Japan has been at peace for nearly 80 years.
      The fast rising Imperial power in East Asia that intends to dominate and oppress others is not Japan, it is China.

      Delete
    4. unlike Germany, Japan still harbours and promotes revisionism, fabricated history which shows them as heroes of Asia and victims of American nuclear aggression - their revisionist history books shows Japan's "advancement" in Greater East Asia Co--Prosperity Sphere with hardly anyone killed; sex slaves (the Jap Army notorious 'comfort women') did not exist nor did the Rape of Nanjing. Monster you betray your identity showing you're definitely not a Chinese, maybe an Indian or Eurasian, wakakaka

      Delete
    5. That mfer is the worst of the genuflecting anmoksusai.

      At least in the past that nonchinese dared to admit it's identity fart.

      This fully bananalized mfer is just a step away from shedding that yellow skin to claim it's spurious whiteness!

      Delete
  2. Meanwhile Bossku The Convicted Mega Crook remains a hero to Malaysia's diehard Melayoo nationalists

    ReplyDelete
  3. A fact that you will never hear Chinese Communist Party arse lickers admit - during WWII , Mao's communists regularly collaborated with the Imperial Japanese Army when it suited their purpose.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Wakakaka…

      Don't just fart with lies!

      Show proofs.

      BTW, don't ever try using those 台毒 twisted propagandas to justify yr know-nothing fart!

      A little bit of true historical fact to fry u - why r that many KMT generals/warlords given up fightings during the early Japanese invaders in the Northeastern part of China? They had superior military power in numbers & western weaponry. Yet they just let the Japanese ransacked those NE Chinese territories w/o serious fighting?

      Mfer, many of them had had been bought over by the Japanese invaders. Only a few, with weaker mind & fighting stomach, chosen to run away from the coming war in order to safe their skin.

      CPC wasn't there then. & even in the later days of fighting, Mao chose to collaborate with Chiang, & allowed the 八路军 legions to be adsorbed into the KMT military profiles to fight the Japanese?

      Truth to be told, it was Chiang & his Yankee-licking & manipulative wife that had in many battlefields easily given the Japanese invaders walkovers!

      Delete