Ramachandra Guha: How Modi is trying to use Gandhi’s name to whitewash his dark record

I first visited Ahmedabad in 1979, and in the following decade went back often for both professional and personal reasons. Then I began research on Gandhi, and my attachment to the city deepened even more. In the summer of 2002, on my first trip back after the horrific riots that had taken place earlier that year, I naturally went to the Sabarmati Ashram, where I spent some time talking to one of the trustees, a quiet, self-effacing man who had spent 30 years in the service of Gandhi. In the course of our conversation, he told me that the Gujarat riots of 2002 were “the second assassination of Mahatma Gandhi”.

The person under whose watch those riots took place, the then chief minister, Narendra Modi, was entirely educated by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, an organisation whose sectarian, xenophobic ideology is utterly at odds with the capacious and open-minded worldview of Gandhi himself. Modi grew up venerating the sarsanghchalak of the RSS, MS Golwalkar, whose detestation of Gandhi is a matter of public record. In a speech in December 1947, Golwalkar remarked: “Mahatma Gandhi could not mislead them any longer. We have the means whereby such men can be immediately silenced, but it is our…

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