Who assassinated Gandhi?
Who really needed Gandhi anyway? The Indian national movement needed Gandhi. For a while. Just for a while only. For that, they imported Gandhi to India from South Africa. Gandhi, who was already a proponent of Renaissance values, studied and absorbed India immediately after he arrived there. He infused Spiritual values and Renaissance values equally into the cultural mold of India. The synthesis he made gave Gandhi and the National movement under his leadership a good foothold in India. Britain was getting to realize that their assets would not suffice to counter the ongoing struggles that were gaining greater momentum in India and other colonized countries. It was at this juncture that the Nazi Germany had expansionist intentions and moves for dominance. Strong military resistances were formed in Eastern and Western Europe and in the Soviet Union. This grew into World War II. The Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan were opposed by the allied powers of Britain, the Soviet Union, China, and France. Later on the United States also joined them. To deal with the war, the colonial powers mobilized troops from their colonies. One of the major reasons for Germany's surrender was the total defeat of their Sixth Army, numbering above 200,000, by the Soviets at the Battle of Stalingrad.
The Indian subcontinent had become well mobilized under the leadership of Gandhi and many other Congress leaders. Since Gandhi's methods of struggle were based on non-violence and satyagraha, Britain had great limitations in defeating it physically with military force. When the World war ended, the soldiers who had gained combat experience returned to their home countries, the colonies, and the colonial powers realized that the already present freedom struggles in those places would certainly become militant and that they would no longer be able to contain them. So they decided to withdraw from their colonies by granting them independence. In addition to these, there was the persuasion from the US that it was time to abandon colonialism. Thus, for multiple reasons, Britain left India and India became a politically independent country.
Gandhi, who had no personal interests for power, became irrelevant in the new situation. Gandhi's synthesis of Spiritual values and the values of Renaissance had long been an eyesore for the forerunner organization of the present day RSS. The spiritual values of honesty, non-violence, and compassion, or the renaissance values of humanism, individuality, and secularism, were unacceptable to them. The Left in India, which was caught up in the materialist philosophy and Marxist categories of class-struggle, could not accept Gandhi, whose main characteristic was his spirituality. Gandhi had long been disliked by the Ambedkarites, as his early Hindu revivalist stances had already gained him the image of an elite-sympathiser. The Muslim League also did not take in Gandhi because of the same reason. After 1948 Gandhi, a man of honesty and simplicity, would slowly become a liability to the Congress.
Therefore, who killed Gandhi?
The contemporary India, devoid of spirituality or humanism and strongly divided into the right and the left, is an India certainly without Gandhi!
