RSS and Gandhiji's assassination, another view

January 30, 2013 17:17

The RSS's role in Mahatma Gandhi's assassination has been debated ad nauseam. Bal Patil now weighs in with his considered opinion on GandhiTopia, a meeting point for Gandhian students, scholars, activists and institutions.

'It would be unsustainable and totally presumptuous to raise an issue that there can be two views of the cold and calculated conspiracy which led to the assassination of the Father of the Nation by diehard fundamentalists nurtured by the RSS,' he writes.

'In a letter to the RSS chief, Golwalkar, on the ban on the RSS following Gandhiji's assassination, Sardar Vallabhabhai Patel, India's first home minister, clearly acknowledged the complicity of the RSS in the Gandhi assassination,' Bal Patil points out.

He further writes: 'The Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Conspiracy to murder Mahatma Gandhi, which was set up in 1965, deserves greater weight than the verdict of the Sessions Court. It was headed by Justice Jivanlal Kapur of the Supreme Court and was provided with evidence not produced in the court; especially the testimony of two of Savarkar's close aides -- Appa Ramachandra Kasar, his bodyguard, and Gajanan Vishnu Damle, his secretary. Had they testified in Court, Savarkar would have been convicted. There was none of the ambiguity surrounding Godse and Apte's visits to Savarkar on January 14 and 17, 1948. Kasar told the Kapur Commission that they visited him on or about January 23 or 24, which was when they returned from Delhi after the bomb incident. Damle deposed that Godse and Apte saw Savarkar "in the middle of January and sat with him (Savarkar) in his garden'.'

The fact is that before the actual assassination in 1948 there were several attempts on Gandhiji's life from 1934, he also points out, and says: 'All the available evidence strongly suggests that the Government failed to protect Gandhiji when it could have done so. The stock excuse provided Government for inadequately security measures is that Government did not like persons attending prayer meetings to be scared.'

Read the full, engaging article here.

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