Gamdhi lived by the principles of truth that he got from Gita. So also would be the claim by Godse. During the trial after Gandhi's assassination, Godse said in his final statement, “My respect for the mahatma was deep and deathless. It therefore gave me no pleasure to kill him. Indeed, my feelings were those of Arjuna when he killed Dronacharya, his Guru at whose feet he learned the art of war”. But Godse could not forgive Gandhi for his pro-Muslim bias. Godse said “I felt convinced that such a man was the greatest enemy, not only of the Hindus, but of the whole nation.”
One of the main reasons that Godse gave for killing Gandhi was the latter’s refusal to conform to the principles of realpolitik. He wanted to remove his brakes on the Government of India so they could conduct statecraft on the basis of ruthless realpolitik. He thought that there was plenty of latent support in the country for his line of thinking and that posterity would vindicate him. GD Khosla, former Chief Justice of Punjab, who heard Godse’s appeal and sent him to the gallows said in his book, The Murder of the Mahatma, that if the verdict had been left to the audience, Godse would have gone scot-free for his assassination of Gandhi.
Thus four people - Ambedkar, Gandhi, Tilak and Godse, three of whom revered the Gita - concluded that the central message of the Gita supported the convictions that they already held. Godse’s reading of the Gita appears to gather more supporters in contemporary India just as he had predicted. Several episodes of the podcast The Seen and The Unseen discuss a theory that I agree with - Indian society is largely conservative and inward-looking.
Akshaya Mukul's book Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India shows how a publishing house, established a century ago, went on to become influential in promoting an idea of Hindu India, and initiated Islamophobia and cow protection that continue to this day. The Gita Press is the largest publisher of Hindu religious texts. All regular Hindu religious texts - Gita, Ramayana, Mahabharata - were published by it. Since it started, the press has published almost 410 million copies of the Gita, nearly 70 million copies of the Ramcharitamanas and 94.8 million copies of monographs on "the ideal Hindu" woman and child. It is a convenient tool of the Hindu Right groups like Hindu Mahasabha, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Jana Sangh and odd organisations like Ram Rajya Parishad.
It has two magazines. Kalyan has a monthly circulation of more than two lakh and mostly sells in north and east Indian states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Rajasthan. It also has an English monthly called Kalyana-kalpataru, started in the early 1930s, that sells in south India and among the diaspora in the US and other countries. Gita Press has been at the forefront of the demand for a Hindu nation right from the beginning. After 1947, the Gita Press talked of not letting Muslims join the Indian Army and forming a Hindu militia. Cow protection has been a key theme of the Gita Press's existence.
The purpose of another of its publications, Hindu Sanskriti Ank, that had contributors like the Shankaracharyas, Mahant Digvijaynath, MS Golwalkar, Swami Karpatri Maharaj and many others, was to establish the supremacy of the sanatan Hindu dharma. This was achieved through emphasis on the comprehensive nature of Hindu culture with its long tradition of education, philosophy, medicine, architecture, science, music, language and literature, besides its numerous religious texts and ritual practices. Many of these articles had political and communal overtones.
It used the message and tenets of sanatan Hindu dharma to homogenise Hindu religion and take the message of the RSS, Hindu Mahasabha and other such organisations to ordinary Hindu homes. The political message that it carries - a trend right from 1926 - helps in carrying out the propaganda in favour of its larger mission of Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan.
Whole Numbers and Half Truths by Rukmini S. reveals some sobering statistics. For decades, we are fed the myth that Indians are basically liberal and secular. But a number of polls have shown that Indians have a lower commitment to democratic principles than most major countries. Indian respondents have an even lower number with respect to regard for civil rights than Pakistani respondents. The percentage of Indian respondents who thought that a strong leader would be "very good" for India was higher than even Russia. (And my guess would be that the majority of the respondents would have been educated city dwellers.)
India ranks poorly regarding respondents who believe in media freedom, free operation of opposition parties, the holding of regular, honest elections with a choice of at least two political parties and the existence of a fair judiciary. In 2019, Indians were among the most satisfied in the world with how democracy in their country was working. A survey of 4 Indian states - Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Odisha - shows that 3/4 of respondents expressed a majoritarian form of nationalism. As levels of education rose in the survey, so did support for restrictions on free speech. 2/3 of Hindus said that it was important to be a Hindu to be "truly" Indian.
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