The Second Death of Mahatma Gandhi

MUMBAI — Protests persist in India months after the government passed a new citizenship law. The law has been challenged in the streets as discriminating against Muslims by allowing immigrants of every major South Asian religion but Islam to seek asylum in the country. In defense of secularism, millions have waved copies of the Indian Constitution, raised posters of Mahatma Gandhi, and held up other symbols of country’s successful struggle against colonial oppression.

After weeks of state repression, Prime Minister Narendra Modi opted to counter criticism differently in January.

“We only implemented what the great freedom fighters had wished to do. We have done Gandhiji’s bidding,” he said, using the Hindi suffix for respect.

In October 2019, India celebrated the 150th anniversary of the birth of the “father of the nation.”

Modi’s mention of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi occurred only days before January 30. On that date in 1948, the pioneer of nonviolent resistance was shot dead in broad daylight by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu fanatic and member of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a religious right-wing group that later nurtured Modi and 38 out of his 53 ministers.

RSS and likeminded groups have longed for a Hindu nation since India’s independence and critics say that the current ruling party works toward that goal. After its landslide re-election in 2019, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) crushed the rights of Kashmir — the Muslim-majority region isolated since the abrogation of its autonomy last August — and championed a court order allowing a Hindu temple to be built on the site of a centuries-old mosque that was demolished in 1992 by a mob reportedly led by RSS-BJP and their associates.

A civil rights advocate and founder of the first mass struggle by peaceful means in the world’s history, Gandhi was also a strong supporter of global religious pluralism. He rejected the partition of the subcontinent led by the ambition of Indian Muslims eager to create their own nation: Pakistan. “What’s there to celebrate? This vivisection of the Mother,” he wrote as India proclaimed its independence. But his opposition to the notion of statehood on the grounds of faith also gained him the animosity of Hindu nationalists.

“Modi invokes everything about Gandhi except Hindu-Muslim harmony, and this was the most crucial element of his work,” says renowned Indian historian Ramachandra Guha, who published a biography of Gandhi, and was arrested at a protest against the citizenship law. “You can’t have Einstein without relativity. You can’t have Darwin without evolution. And you can’t have Gandhi without Hindu-Muslim harmony.”

The misappropriation of Gandhi by India’s current political establishment, critics say, is just the latest stage of an ideological strategy that started with his defamation and ultimately aims to rewrite India’s history.