Who stole Gandhi's ashes?

As the world was celebrating M K Gandhi's 150th birth anniversary early this month someone broke into Bapu Bhavan, stole the urn containing his ashes and defaced his portraits. Gandhi was assassinated in 1948 by an extremist Hindu named Nathuram Godse, who told the then trial court that this 'so-called Father of Nation had failed his paternal duty by consenting to partition of India'. A hundred and fifty years on, Gandhi has been assassinated once again - by someone unidentified but certainly nurturing the Hindutva mindset, a brainchild of RSS and political agenda of Narendra Modi-headed Indian government. No wonder then that there was not much of condemnation of this act of sacrilege as if in today's India defending Ghandi's life and work is no more a passion. Had his assassin been a Muslim, in the words of the then governor-general of India, Lord Mountbatten, there would have been a bloodbath, an apprehension that forced the first deputy prime minister of India Vallabhbhai Patel asked All-India Radio to say "His assassin was Hindu".

In his frail, emaciated body there were three Gandhis. One was, in the words of Prime Minister Imran "the great Mahatma Gandhi" - though he and many others should know the real Gandhi. The other Gandhi was an agent of the Empire who recruited the Indians to fight natives in 1899 during the Boer war. The Africans haven't forgotten his treacherous role during his sojourn in South Africa. So much so that some time back, a statue of this "racist" was removed from a university campus in Ghana. His was a dubious character, having a scheming mind in his half-naked body. When someone asked him why he was against 'sex for pleasure' his prompt riposte was 'sex is for procreation, not pleasure'. Was he honest about his assertion? And among the doubters is renowned biography writer Robert Payne, who in his "The life and death of Mahatma Gandhi", says Gandhi refused to leave the bed he was sleeping in with his wife when his mother raised a huge cry from the ground floor that his father was breathing his last.

However, it is the third Gandhi who is on the stage now, inviting both kind and unkind comments. He was against partition, but he won't say it in so many words. In September 1944, at a Gandhi-Jinnah meeting in Bombay to discuss the future of India in the light of a Cyril Radcliffe formula, "Gandhi agreed to a partition after the British withdrawal, Jinnah insisted on a division before independence, because he had serious doubts whether Congress would keep its pledge once the British depart," says K K Aziz in his "Britain and Muslim India". It was so because M K Gandhi was of the same mind as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the mothership of the ruling BJP. But he would remain undisclosed. Subsequently, although the All India Congress Committee's resolution of July 14, 1947 accepted the partition plan, the party also expressed hope "when current passions had subsided India would again be united and one". And Gandhi was no less optimistic; in his message he predicted "time would come when partition would be undone".

The answer to question whether it was his non-violent civil movement that won freedom for the sub-continent is in the negative. By the time he returned from his controversy-ridden sojourn in South Africa quite a few movements were already afoot asking for the locals' share in governance. The colonial power too was conceding, albeit slowly and grudgingly, ground to them. Then came the World War II, which the colonial power did win, but by then it was too exhausted to hold on to this colony. They were prepared to leave, and Gandhi had nothing to do with it. It was Mohammad Ali Jinnah who forced partition, as he had succeeded in convincing the British that Muslims and Hindus are two distinctly different worlds, and need to be accepted as such. In fact, Gandhi too wanted what Narendra Modi is trying at now. Pity, the sacrilege of Gandhi's remains has not been condemned by the Modi establishment.