Who killed Gandhi?

GANDHI AND THE UNSPEAKABLE: His Final Experiment With Truth, by James W Douglass. Orbis Books (New York). 2012. 168pp. ISBN: 978-1570759635

Reviewed by Paddy Kearney

According to James W Douglass, Americans have no problem in accepting that their government has been involved in political assassinations around the world for many years. But they have a strange reluctance to believe that assassination is a weapon that the US government could also turn on its own citizens.

Douglass has been chipping away at this denialism through extensive research and writings on four well-known assassinations in the US: John F Kennedy and his brother Bobby, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Douglass, a Catholic social and peace activist, has no doubt that each of these assassinations was planned and organised by agents of the “military-industrial complex and its intelligence agencies”.

In this slim volume, Douglass turns his attention to an earlier assassination on another continent, worlds away from the US. He argues that the shooting of Mahatma Gandhi was carried out with at least the collusion of the Indian government, if not its direct and active involvement.

What makes Gandhi’s assassination all the more remarkable (or perhaps one should say “Unspeakable”) is that it took place in 1948 just six months after India had celebrated its independence from Britain — an achievement generally accredited to Gandhi, regarded as the father of the nation.

Gandhi and the Unspeakable sets out the evidence for Douglass’s claim that the Mahatma was killed “by forces determined to destroy both him and his vision of a non-violent, democratic India”. The new government seemed to have quickly replaced their founding father’s principles of non-violence with those of a national security state.

Gandhi knew Nathuram Godse, the man who shot him and who had previously failed in an attempt to kill him by means of a bomb. True to his profoundly non-violent philosophy, Gandhi had invited Godse to spend a week with him so that he would learn the power of non-violence.

Gandhi also knew VD Sawarkar, the Hindu religious leader who promoted the idea of assassination as a strategy to achieve change; Sawarkar was in the background, scheming the demise of his great intellectual rival. The two men’s views of India and its future could not have been more different: violence vs non-violence; terrorism vs satyagraha (“soul force”), assassination vs martyrdom.

Though India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, professed to be a great friend and admirer of Gandhi and was clearly distressed by his assassination, he had not taken obvious steps to protect Gandhi after the earlier attempt on his life. Standard government security procedures should have been put into operation, with those responsible for the failed attempt arrested. Instead they were left totally free to make another attempt. The negligence and inaction of the police made them just as guilty as the murderers themselves.

But Douglass always speaks of “assassins” in the plural to stress that Godse was simply the instrument of a much wider movement to get rid of Gandhi who was seen as a threat to the Indian nation. Sawarkar and his supporters feared that Gandhi’s idea of non-violence would weaken the Indian people and lead to their destruction. The only solution was to remove Gandhi from the scene: that would be the end of his crazy notions.

But Nehru was also to blame. He had already betrayed Gandhi in an even more insidious way, by his secret efforts to research and develop India’s capacity to make the atomic bomb. How could he profess to admire Gandhi so greatly and yet be involved in promoting nuclear warfare? It is this disjuncture between words and actions that Douglass labels “the Unspeakable”.

He derives the term from Thomas Merton who defines “the Unspeakable” in these terms: “It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss.”