The Killing of Gandhi, the Tales Told Thereafter: A Scrutiny of the Sectarian Narrative

Nearly a month after Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination in India on 30 January 1948, Sardar Patel, the then Home Minister, wrote to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru on 27 February 1948 pointing to Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and his group: ‘It was a fanatical wing of the Hindu Mahasabha directly under Savarkar that (hatched) the conspiracy and saw it through’ (Das 1973: 56). At this time, Patel made a distinction between the ‘fanatical wing of the Hindu Mahasabha directly under Savarkar’ , which he held responsible for having hatched the conspiracy to assassinate Gandhi, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which he suggested was ‘not involved’.