following assurances from Hindu and Muslim leaders that there would
be no further violence, he had a hand grenade thrown at him two days
later by a Hindu refugee from West Punjab; it exploded without injuring
anyone. Then, on January 30, 1948, the old man made his final contri-
bution to the cause of Indian unity. At his prayer meeting at Birla House
on Akbar Road in New Delhi, he was shot three times at point-blank
range by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu and a member of the RSS.
As the news of Gandhi’s death spread, public anger began to build
up, and Hindu groups, assuming that he had been killed by a Muslim,
began to gather. The news that Gandhi had been killed by a Hindu was
as disarming as it was unexpected; when the news of the RSS’s involve-
ment in his murder became known, angry mobs destroyed RSS and Hindu
Mahasabha offices and attacked its members. While this directed violence
away from Muslims – and was a reminder that violence had become a
feature of the times that had haunted India since 1946, and would take
different forms at different times – it also underlined the fact that the
atmosphere of violence could not be allowed to continue unchecked. On
the evening of January 30, 1948, Nehru, on the radio, appealed for calm.
‘Friends and comrades, the light has gone out of our lives and there is
darkness everywhere,’ he said simply;^10 and for him, this was the end of a
long, intimate and agonised relationship with a man who had genuinely
become an alternative father figure, one with whom he had conducted his
essential political and emotional dialogues for the last thirty-two years of
his life, one whose closeness had made political disagreement a painful and
personal matter on both sides. Neither ever gave up the hope of bringing
the other round to their way of thinking. ‘I know this,’ Gandhi had said
in January 1941, in naming Nehru as his chosen successor as Congress
leader, ‘that when I am gone he will speak my language.’^11 For all their
political disagreements, neither man had doubted the other’s sincerity. As
a man who had been forced to live most of his life in public fora, Nehru
had not had much time to develop close relationships with very many
people; Gandhi had been an exception and his death left Nehru awkwardly
bereft of personal support.
In the days that followed Gandhi’s assassination, Nehru reiterated what
he now declared to be the Mahatma’s central message: unity between
Hindus and Muslims, and opposition to sectarian violence. ‘It is a shame
to me as an Indian... It is a shame to me as a Hindu,’ Nehru said of
Gandhi’s assassination, speaking, strategically, as a Hindu himself.^12174 CONSOLIDATING THE STATE, c. 1947–55