On February 12, Gandhi’s ashes were immersed at the sacred confluence
of the Ganga and the Yamuna rivers at Allahabad, coincidentally Nehru’s
home town. Nehru’s speech, in Hindustani, warned of the dangers of
idolatry of Gandhi, and reminded the vast gathered crowd to consider his
message of tolerance and of non-violence instead.
Gandhi’s murder helped to dampen down the atmosphere of communal
violence. It also provided the government an opportunity to ban
‘communal organisations’ – the RSS, the Muslim National Guards (the
‘volunteer unit’ of the Muslim League) and the Khaksars, a paramilitary
Muslim unit modelled, like the RSS, on the Nazi stormtroopers. On
February 5, 1948, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, former Hindu Mahasabha
president and main ideologue of Hindu race theory, was arrested. The
awkward question was what was to be done about SP Mukherjee,
Industries minister in Nehru’s Cabinet and president of the Hindu
Mahasabha. Throughout the period of violence, Nehru had asked him to
stop flying the saffron flag of the Hindu Mahasabha above his ministerial
house, and to make a statement clarifying his position on the RSS’s
murderous activities and on the death threats against Gandhi and Nehru
himself – the last such request having been written on January 28, 1948,
two days before the murder of Gandhi. Now, Gandhi’s assassination
forced the issue, but the response was unexpected and disarming. On
February 15, 1948, the Hindu Mahasabha, by a resolution of its Working
Committee, liquidated itself – or more precisely, suspended its political
activities in favour of ‘cultural’ ones (its political wing was shortly
to reappear under the innocuous name of the ‘Jan Sangh’, translatable,
in conformity with the obligatory populist language of the time, as
‘people’s organisation’). On the same day, the UP Parliamentary Muslim
League also liquidated itself, post-dating the end by two weeks, and also
reappeared under a new name. Other banned organisations tended,
similarly, to regroup and reconfigure themselves over time.
Effectively, this had only dealt with the overtly sectarian organisations,
and with overt expressions of sectarianism. Those whose sentiments or
goals were not very different from the Hindu Mahasabha’s, for instance,
could still hide in the Congress. And by pushing the tendency into an
enforced silence, problems had been made more difficult to identify.
Nehru suspected, for instance, large-scale collusion by the police in
suppressing evidence of larger RSS involvement in Gandhi’s murder; but
his Home minister, Patel, assured him that only a few ‘extreme elements’
CONSOLIDATING THE STATE, c. 1947–55 175